Wherewith to Sate Its Malice
by CBK1000
Summary: It is the Autumn of Terror. Consulting detective Caroline Forbes must join forces with the world's most dangerous criminal to solve her most challenging case yet. Caroline as Sherlock; Klaus as Moriarty. The Sherlock AU tumblr peer pressured me into writing.
1. Part One

**A/N: So this is the Sherlock KC AU no one asked for until I started tossing headcanons around on tumblr, and now...here we are. I wasn't supposed to write this, but, alas, I'm weak.**

 **There are too many references to the original canon to list them all; just know that the majority of the deductions are taken from ACD's stories. The descriptions of Scotland Yard's interior are actually based on the game Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments for plot reasons. Also, obviously Inspector Lestrade did not head the Ripper investigation, considering the fact that he never existed. I will mention several of the detectives who were actually involved in the murder investigation, but for the most part the police force will be populated by ACD's inventions.**

 **Caroline is the hardest character for me to write in a historical setting because her speech doesn't suit it nearly as well as the Originals'. But the point in writing an AU is to take the same characters we know and love, drop them off in another setting, and somehow manipulate everything so that they're still the characters we know and love. Caroline's diction is a part of that, so I've mostly preserved it; I hope that isn't too jarringly anachronistic.**

 **All newspaper article excerpts/any document excerpts whatsoever are taken directly from real reports; I didn't write them.**

 **This will be at least two parts, probably three, knowing my propensity for blathering on about Historical Eras That Give Jenn a Boner.**

 **Tim cameo for Kirythestitchwitch. Enzo is dedicated to clonemaster-general.**

 **Also, for some reason this site decided not to save a chunk of edits in the middle of this fic; I've gone back through it, and hopefully caught the things that for some reason weren't saved. If you find any typos, I sincerely apologise; I don't know why it did that. It was very odd; some passages had the changes I made to them, and yet other edits were missing from those same passages even though I saved at multiple points throughout the editing process. Anyway, eat my dick, . And fuck you for forcing me to break up your url like that; it looks ridiculous.**

 **Title is from a Shelley poem called 'Queen Mab'.**

* * *

 _In 1892 London decided upon an extraordinarily wet spring, and the mud retired from its banks to holiday upon the streets. Man is given to melancholy in such weather, having no light save that which is bled from those anaemic clouds, when even those gay heralds of winter's demise have drooped sadly from their branches, and God, it seems, has overturned his palette in favour of mourning crepe. What thin offering the gas lights poke into the corners of his heart is no consolation when, having ventured one tremulous adventure above these canals which once might be classed as boulevards, it sinks with nary a blink once more beneath its waters._

 _I have had some fortunate occasion to record the prior feats of a singular individual with whom you will have acquainted yourself earlier in these musings, and in now looking out into this mist of foam and flotsam, which the waters have carried from all corners of the world and deposited here in Belgravia, where it seems even I am not immune to these fits of common grief, I find myself compelled to elaborate upon one of the more remarkable events of His career._

 _In dipping our pen into that biographical inkwell, we are compelled to add a few fleur-de-lis to even the most accomplished of men. And yet none are here required; He alone stands above the stage of man with its petty failures and mean human inconsistencies. He had, you will recall from former entries, no equal._

 _However, in the fall of 1888, history, as so often it will, decided to blot onto the record of this Caesarean titan a single stain; a speck, and yet one dust mote may disable the entire eye, and so vanquish even a Cyclops._

 _London was then in similar throes, a dreary Atlantis, toiling under its seas, and in divesting itself of one grey afternoon, immediately afterward donned another. In August there occurred a murder which put the gazettes on their tiptoes, and strained the throats of every paper lad and which, as with every London slaughter, irrespective of brutality, had the good grace to bury itself soon afterward, to make way for fresher scandals. You might say we perform a remarkable…slayed offhand in this city where crime is but a mere Tuesday._

 _Let us wander back on patient tiptoes, then, and through what humble gifts of my pen I may have the pleasure of providing, peek from these pages into near pasts, and let the fogs close behind us, vanquishing every trace of the candle by which you make out this page, and the fireplace where those stoked coals melt December, ever hot on our heels, from your toes._

 _At an hour such as this, when our narrative commences, you will find London one long avenue of fog. Figures are conjured from this mist; in its depths whole buildings are assembled and thrown up with haphazard glee: here you are surprised by a tenement, there a butcher's. The fog itself seems to speak when from out of its turmoil, unseen, there drift the sounds of hooves and men, and, turning, you are startled to find these apparitions suddenly within arm's reach. Man is never more surprised to find himself not alone than in streets such as these._

 _But in turning again, in following the natural inclination of London to twist back on itself, to wind, not along the main boulevards, but through these grimy side alleys where indeed the mist is a sole companion, where the gas lights dare not a finger, and the coppers merely flash their lanterns, here you will find Him, dashingly (if I may venture such an aside) clad, and carelessly whistling. Here are the forgotten avenues, the respite of beggars and blackhearts, here the untouched corners, where the fog settles comfortably, unchallenged by sun or gas, here the rubbish, the refuse, the cast-offs which society has set adrift._

 _Here all the gathering of all the hells which stalk this naked world, cloaking neither its calluses nor its vulnerabilities._

 _Here, baying at His heels, everything which gathers in such alleys, in such fogs, and with that unstoppable force inertia, swells, swells, and will, with only that feeble wall humanity to hinder it, scatter into the morning._

 _You may recall some amusing accounts which, pale beside His own, nevertheless offer some wonderment for smaller minds, and which centre round a name with which you perhaps have already acquainted yourself._

 _Here is where he turns, then, from the alleys once more onto the streets, and once again into a little boulevard called Baker Street._

* * *

Outside, London is sleeping beneath the fog.

You can hear the tock tock tocking of the horses and somewhere the foghorn lowing, out over the waters to the ships which glide soundlessly to port on these muffled waves or founder out at sea, a mournful sort of seeking, the kind you send out in one human moment to a blind dumb world where no one cares to receive it.

She listens to the hissing of the gas light, and cocks her head.

Kol has stolen her freaking 'M' encyclopedia again, she realizes, standing with 'L' in hand.

She leaves him a note on the sofa: 'Either my perfectly organized bookshelf is put back to exacting alphabetical flawlessness by 3 o'clock this afternoon, or I take two body parts of my choice. GUESS WHICH.'

There's a clatter of boots on the stoop downstairs. She shelves the 'L', and stands listening for a moment to the fog, the horses, all these slow and lumbering wakings of the city. The boots have left the stoop, hurried away down the street, and then returned to pace beneath her window.

They do that sometimes.

They think, but it's only a girl, and stand for so long trying to decide whether to ring or fade back into the city.

She opens the window and sticks out her head.

The man below her window starts, looks up, takes off his hat.

Maybe twenty-seven, blonde, clean-shaven, young in the way that beggars are not, but dressed in a worn coat, and with patches on his pants, so, once prosperous, fallen: it's all she can tell from here; in the fog, in the flashes of hansoms which raise that distant thunder struggling up through so many layers of mist to reach her he is vanished at intervals and then reappears with that hat squashed in his hand, and his face awkwardly crumpled.

"Come upstairs. It's 221B," she says, and shuts the window again.

He's 26, near tears, a minor clerk, childless, intelligent but careless of it, as most 26-year-olds are.

Boys are always throwing away that sort of thing.

His face beneath the blonde curls, which the mist confused, as if underwater, is ridiculously handsome, but he's too timid to take advantage of it. "Miss Forbes, I'm dreadfully sorry to bother you at such an hour," he says, squeezing the hat.

"It's ok; I'm awake at three every morning," she replies, and sits him in a chair, and then draws up her own across from him, with the gas light behind her, so the full spluttering cone of it is thrown on his face.

"My fiancée, you see, she's disappeared."

He takes out a letter from his coat, creased several times, and, trembling, unfolds it so he can hand it across to her.

There's something.

This little niggling thread which winds all the way down into the depths of her and which in following she keeps losing, and losing again, but it's still there, tickling, throwing up sparks somewhere, saying to her no, no, keep going, there's something here, in the nervous throat above his muffler and the twitchy hands and all this humble surface gloss-

She takes the letter.

"Something isn't right. Her parents aren't very…amiable to the match, but we'd decided to marry anyway, and now suddenly she's gone abroad. And this note, as well, from my mother, who's been so supportive of us, and now suddenly- she says women these days have no hearts, and they won't hesitate to break another's. And Jane's letter- there was no return address, no identifying information, only this little note, it's all I have, I don't even know where she's gone, but she promises herself to me, she says not to worry, she'll be back soon, and we'll be married at once. Miss Forbes, can you tell from where it's been sent? Is it possible my mother knows something?" He sits back in his chair, rubbing one of his hands anxiously.

She carries both of the letters over to her work table, and flattening them out under the gas lamp, takes out her magnifying glass, and meanwhile she turns over that niggling, trembling something in her mind, touches it from every angle as she lifts and turns the papers and runs the glass over them, going back over his whole quivering figure, first in the fog, and then in the room, where all the little details of him are counted off one after another, the muffler, the worn coat, the young and timid face, the long-fingered hands, ink-stained, and that hat, wrung between them-

She turns over the mother's letter.

So.

The hat.

She shuts her eyes for a moment.

Tock tock tock from the horses and that long and mournful calling, into the fog, into the Thames, across all the haunted corners of desolate Whitechapel.

"Both the letters are from your mother," she says without opening her eyes. "She hired an actress to play your fiancée and then abandon you so that you'd see the only woman who'd ever love you is your mother, who's sick, probably consumptive, but she's always been controlling, and she was never going to let you marry and leave her, consumption or no consumption. And you're not who you say you are."

She opens her eyes and turns around.

His face has undergone this whole transformation.

He's sitting with one leg crossed over the other with such easy confidence, and there's this coiling, an animal thing, you can feel it, not just in him but in yourself, walking its premonitory fingers down your spine.

They look at one another for a moment.

She thinks: here's where you slink a little, you walk like there's something nesting inside you, something frothing, something even his self-assurance can quail before. You tell them: not just a girl. You tell them: it's not a slur to wear petticoats and walk softly, with a big parasol.

"In my anxiety, I forgot to introduce myself properly, so in all fairness, I haven't technically misrepresented myself." Even his voice has changed, and he is 100% aware of his own attractiveness, and how the dimples in either cheek go straight to your head, just for a minute, just until you straighten your shoulders, and you clasp your hands behind your back, and you put all twenty four years of carefully honed logic between yourself and this man who tells all the little evolutionary twists of you that still know how to scent a predator, he's not a man, not quite.

"The letters aren't yours. Are they even real?"

"Oh, quite," he says, leaning forward and steepling his fingers beneath his chin. "They belonged to a friend of mine. Recently departed. Terrible tragedy."

"Your hat," she says, and snatches it out of his hands. "Good quality, but battered, bought in a premium shop three years ago, so you had money, but you don't anymore, because no one who buys a hat like this doesn't replace it once it's in this kind of shape. Unbrushed, faded in several spots, but you still care enough about appearances to smear it with some ink, so you care about not having money anymore, you're not a drunk, then, maybe a gambler, except- it's a forgery. A good one. This hat was actually bought…three days ago?" He nods slightly, still smiling. "And manually aged. So you're not poor, but you wanted me to think you are, which means everything else about your appearance is probably carefully cultivated to lead me astray. So you're not a clerk, you don't have an overbearing mother, although you're probably childless, because you're an ass, and I want to have more faith in female kind, that it'd say nope, no thanks to procreating with you. Shhhjt," she says when he opens his mouth to comment. "Don't interrupt me." She brings the hat to her nose. "You don't have any pomade in your hair."

"Astute observation."

"But someone with pomade in their hair recently wore this. And you can only buy this scent from one shop, a high-end one where it's specially mixed for one specific customer."

She tosses the hat back to him. "You're Kol's brother, aren't you?"

His dimples go even deeper; he doesn't seem perturbed at all. "You are quick, aren't you?"

"No, Scotland Yard puts aside its tiny, much-lamented penis and ridiculously fragile ego to call in me, a mere woman, because I'm an idiot."

That doesn't perturb him either. He leans forward a little, clasping his hands on top of the hat he's caught one-handed, so nonchalantly she is almost completely certain he practices it in front of his mirror. "I thought it might be time for us to meet at last. You have been poking at my organization for months now. Thought I'd suss out the competition, so to speak. It seems you might not disappoint me after all."

"I'm glad," she snaps. "Last night I couldn't sleep, wondering if I might meet your standards."

He licks his lips a little and leans forward even more, looking at her in a way so you can feel it in every inch between them, something penetrating, something that touches all the parts of you that ice over first, the spine, the suddenly nerveless hands, wooden on her skirts.

There's this whole other presence in the room, like something precedes him. It's in all the buried parts of you that still quiver after the gaslights have been put out, and in your warm abode you feel some cold portent of the world Outside.

She picks up the cane leaning against the wall beside the door and tries to hit him in the face.

He grabs her by the wrist.

There's this brief struggle: it's usually over this fast, but it doesn't end like this, with the cane sailing out of her hands, and her face pressed into the wall so she can feel some pain, just enough to remind her she's been bested, but he doesn't hurt her, not quite, he presses her into the wall and puts his lips right against her ear, but he doesn't hurt her: that would be too easy. "Ah, ah, sweetheart; let's not be like that, hmm?" He tsks; she can feel his breath on her cheek. He smells damp; he's still a little slick from his walk. There's a faint lingering odor of soot in his hair, and, underneath that, his soap.

She doesn't struggle; he'd like that. Men like this: they want to watch you fight till all the hope goes out of you.

"This is my polite warning to keep your little nose out of my affairs. Now, I only grant one warning, so use it wisely. I'd hate for you to end up in the Thames. All that decomposition would do just terrible things to your complexion." She can feel him smile against her.

She reaches her hand back and grabs him by the testicles.

The trick is to squeeze and turn; it's just like a doorknob, except with more vomiting and tears.

She kneels down with him as he sinks to the floor, still holding him, her skirts flaring our around her knees, like a lady. She hasn't even flashed an ankle. "Ok, so. Here's what I think of your warning." She boops him on the nose. "Now. I have a garden party at two this afternoon, so if I don't start last minute preparations now, somebody's not getting their hors d'oeuvres, and I don't have to tell you how even a triple poisoner is completely harmless next to a middle-aged parishioner who misses out on the snacks. Leave, and in a few months when I have enough evidence, I'll have you arrested. Right now, you are just wasting my time."

You can't turn your back on someone like this, so when she stands up, she grabs Kol's revolver off the mantle, groping around behind her for it, and turns it on him with her sternest Not Impressed face.

He knocks the gun out of her hand and throws her down into one of the armchairs.

He's completely incensed; he grabs her by the hair and bends her head back so he can loom over her all doom-like, still pinched around his lips, and with no color in his cheeks, but he's one toe out of the asylum if the whispers are correct, and she forgot to account for the effect of crazy on the human pain threshold.

He doesn't want to lose his composure; she can see him struggling with it. This was supposed to be his Moment, she was supposed to cower, kneel, etc. "Send my regards to my brother," he says, a little breathlessly, and for a moment she thinks, he's incandescent, you can see his rage from the street, through the fog, through the rain she can hear now against her window, but it's not just anger, it's a different kind of strain in his voice, he licks his lips, he looks down into her eyes, for a moment he just hovers there, half an inch away.

He pulls back with the gun in her hand, and cracks his neck, and now for a moment she realizes here it is, she's about to die, Kol will return to find her splattered across the wall and scattered all about her couch (he looks like a mutilator), but, no, he puts the gun in his jacket, and walks backward to her analysis table, smiling the way he did when she first turned back to him with the letters in her hand. "This looks important," he says, and picks up one of her beakers.

He drops it.

He swaps the labels on three of her beakers, breaks another, takes all of her pipettes.

The hat is retrieved from the floor, and with a flourish, he rolls it all the way up his arm to his head, where he settles it at an angle.

"Good day, Miss Forbes," he says in his Downtrodden Clerk voice, winking. "You may keep the letters. A little souvenir, if you will."

She chases him all the way out into the street, but he's vanished into the fog.

* * *

She throws open the door to her apartment just as Kol shoots one of the vases from her Aunt Vespa.

It explodes; for a moment she staggers back against the wall, her ears ringing. "What are you doing!" she yells. "How many times have I told you no shooting in the house?"

He spreads his arms, and then takes aim again. "Come on, darling; that vase was a travesty. I've done it and your decor a favor."

She wrenches the gun away from him before he can take another shot and, after struggling briefly with herself, to pistol whip or not to pistol whip, she puts it aside on the mantel where there is now an empty spot, courtesy of his brother. "I had a visitor this morning," she says as he throws himself down on her couch, where he's already discarded his wrinkled jacket.

"A gentlemen caller? If he was any good, send him my way after you're done with him. Maybe ding him up a bit emotionally first. They're more open to strange, morally repugnant things that way."

"It was your brother."

He sits up slowly on the couch, like he can't be lying down for this news. "Nik? Did he hurt you?"

"He broke and/or stole half of my analysis table!"

"So, only your ego's a bit roughed up then?" he asks, and now he swings himself off the couch and comes over to examine her, lightly touching her chin. "You could be a lot worse for the wear after an encounter with Nik."

"Did you get my note?" she demands, rounding on him as he makes his way back to the sofa, rolling up one of the sleeves that's sagged down his arm a little. He's been carousing in style somewhere; his hair is all roughed up, the jacket he's slung over the sofa with a new tear in its left arm and that pungent hanger-on opium that will take her days to air out of the apartment.

"Is that what was crinkling underneath me?" he asks, throwing himself down on top of it again, and flinging one arm up over his eyes. "Listen, darling, I'd love to read up on whatever sin I've committed this time, leaving fingerprints on the mantel, bumping the easy-chair and removing it one quarter of an inch from its proper place, etc., etc., but I'm fagged. It's been a long night. Lots of sex."

She rips the note out from underneath him and hurls it onto his face. "Put my bookcase back in order by the time I'm home, or else. The note explains it in exacting but succinct terms, which I'm sure you'll appreciate. You can read and still have time to clean up the muddy bootprints you left all over the rug."

"You're not angry at me, darling. Take it out on my brother. I can give you the names of several establishments where you just might so happen to bump into him."

"I'm angry at both of you. For all of his other glaring defects, _he_ didn't track mud all over my apartment, or take my encyclopedia."

He opens his eyes and creases his face into something smirkily reminiscent of his brother. "You can have it back for the price of that woman's contact info, the one from the case with the snake?"

"No."

He sighs way too dramatically and works his shoulders back into the sofa, propping one of his boots on the armrest. "I can obtain it through less savoury means, but I'm a gentleman as you know, I thought I'd ask you first. And with a recommendation from her savior, it's less work for me."

"I'm not giving you as a 'recommendation' to anyone. I'm not evil. A little bit sharp sometimes, when people can't be bothered to do things the way I tell them to, but not evil."

"What time is your party?" he asks without opening his eyes. He's beating his boots to some invisible rhythm, showering little bits of mud and who knows what other street detritus onto the floor.

"Two. Precisely."

"Right. I'll see you then, darling."

"No, you won't. You're not invited."

"I invited myself. No party is complete without me."

"It's lawn croquet and cucumber sandwiches, not cocaine and group sex."

"Do you see why you need me?" he says, and deftly shifts his hip so the shoe she throws at him bounces instead off the sofa and falls with a thud to the floor.

* * *

Caroline is some days complaining about his brother; Nik tends to have that effect on women. You ought to meet their sister.

London is similarly tempestuous, and for an entire week pours down every cloud onto the miserable horses and the griping workers which through their bow-window pass in white fairy steams that insulate them from the watchers above.

Nik makes three attempts on her life; she's not very fussed about them. There's a dramatic moment when an aspiring assassin shoots at her from a hansom passing at full gallop, he thought that was going to be quite a show, but Caroline merely landed the ever-present cane smack into the wheel spokes, crashed the carriage, overtook the assassin, and in full view of Constable Something trussed him like a pig for easy transportation.

Anyway, he won't even mention the poisoned letter. Not Nik's finest. One rather wonders if he's even trying.

They're sitting before the fire warming their feet, his own in Caroline's lap, which he must share with a bundle of papers she's perusing, when downstairs someone rings the bell.

A constable is shown into the flat by Mrs. Hudson, an unfamiliar one, new by the looks of him, somewhat nervous in the presence of all those blonde curls and white skin, very virginal of you, darling, and taking off his hat in order to occupy them in some way, stammers out, "Constable Hopkins. Inspector Lestrade's sent me round to knock you up, miss. Ma'am." He clears his throat, and adopts a more manly mien. Excellent, darling. "Sorry to intrude upon you, but there's been a murder out at Woodman's Lee. Rather frightful one; Inspector Lestrade's on site at the moment, and says we must have your assistance."

Caroline sets aside her papers, but doesn't disturb his feet. "Give me a brief sketch of the events."

Constable Hopkins is somewhat taken aback. "Excuse me?"

"I'm not one of Lestrade's constables; I don't have to come running just because he's summoned me. So I want to know if the case is of any interest to me. Also, Lestrade's kind of a…"

"Prat?" he supplies.

"Yes. So it has to be something of significant intrigue to persuade me to actually work alongside him. You can speak in front of my colleague; he often accompanies me on cases," she says in response to the glance the constable throws at him from beneath his lashes, a sideways thing, very hurtful.

"A man's been spit clean through with one thrust of a spear; I don't know how any man could have done it, miss. Not with that sort of force."

"Oh," she says, and sits forward with her fingers beneath her bottom lip, and in so doing lending herself a resemblance to Nik that she'd hardly appreciate.

"Captain Peter Carey was found dead in his cabin this morning; the wife and daughter sent to the village for the police. And what we found- it's like a slaughterhouse, miss. Inspector Lestrade says he hasn't seen anything like it since that poor girl what was slashed at George Yard."

"Ok," she says, as if God proclaiming a judgement upon His subjects.

* * *

The following week is uncommonly busy; Caroline darts here and there to all the various districts unraveling some particularly knotty skein or another; the Irregulars peep in and out at steady intervals to leave their missives in the sitting room. He sees Enzo three times in as many days.

Having then to amuse himself, he engages in those revels which common decency has taught him must be abhorred and which on the contrary he finds quite natty, but even these pale eventually: one does tire of orgies and the various thorny intrigues which inevitably spring up between participants.

He didn't believe it either, darlings.

He does poke two of Whitechapel's more touchy gangs into open warfare, but that's hardly any challenge. On Tuesday he flagellates Countess Maria and her lover, on Wednesday cheats a prince out of half his inheritance, and on a drizzly Thursday, stands with his jacket turned up to those invasions of mist and smoke which, in trying to gain admittance to his back, curl innocently round his collar to test its wooly mettle.

From the pub across the street there is raised a cry of "Thief", hardly worth even turning round for, and so he continues hovering with the handsomest angle of his face turned toward the passing cabs and dogcarts, lingering with just enough casualness that he may say it's only that accident of fate which has happened to deposit him here, adjacent to her flat, nothing would be so absurd as to suggest he's waiting as an abandoned dog pines after its master, and has tired of lying round the flat, and come here, where he will spot her first.

August has nearly finished and autumn come firmly into the full flower of its assurance that its reign will be a prolonged one and the horses, sensing this before any of their bundled masters, droop their heads with the burden of this presentiment, kicking at the mud. Watch the beasts, whose barometers are always tuned to that special frequency which man will never sense till its blundered into his courtyard, and found all the chinks in his windows.

He blows into his hands.

He's just decided to nip into the pub when he spots a man coming along the pavement opposite him, in just his shirtsleeves, and under a Donegal hat that's capitulated somewhat pathetically to the downpour, and sags forward over his eyes. He's at least a head taller than most of those passersby who jostle him in their own preoccupied rush toward those goals at which all passersby are always straining, and stops before the flat, where he rings the bell and waits politely for a response, though he's soaked.

The page Billy admits him, and within a minute he's come back out into the rain with his hands in his pockets, so he's either a disappointed client or one of those Baker Street Irregulars to which Caroline is always adding.

He looks straight ahead for just a moment, across the street to a spot where their eyes may meet halfway, and hold for merely a second in that incidental collaboration of strangers who are occasionally thrown from their own sphere into another's.

The man only looks at him for a moment, and then strolls on away down the pavement.

He sees that he's got very blue eyes.

* * *

When Caroline is chewing over something, when her mind must worry at it for some time, she reorganizes her newspaper editions till she has got at the soul of it.

There is absolute silence at these moments.

The moon laps at the bow-window, solitary in its reign; the street lamps have been put out.

He flips the cylinder of his revolver in and out, having recently oiled it so that the movement will not bring Caroline's Wrath onto his head; if you think his brother, who has ended an entire bloodline and buried not less than two of his sister's husbands, is fodder for your tales, fabled bogeyman of those closet recesses which whisper down their superstitions with their mothballs, you ought to disturb Caroline in the midst of her tidying.

As with most of his stories, this begins: once upon a time when he was drunk. And there he'll stop. The details are too horrific; there is a triple murderer incarcerated at Newgate, a strangler, very mad, who cried upon the retelling of them.

When she's come round to the sofa where she'll put her feet in his lap and her head back against the rest he may breathe again. She sighs and thrusts her hands into her hair; the newsprint has left a smudge on her cheek. "What is it this time? The orange pips?" he asks her, tweaking the toes in his lap.

"No, I solved that one yesterday. It's your brother."

"Has he tried to kill you again? I can break one of his kneecaps with a bat, but I can't guarantee I can get to the other before he shoots me. Still, I'm willing to try."

"He hasn't bothered me in days."

"And that disappoints you?"

"It concerns me. It means he's…lurking somewhere."

"That is one of Nik's favourite means of transportation."

She's got that look on her face again: when something has perplexed her beyond the usual twists of a Tuesday letter bombing, she takes her bottom lip between her teeth and forms her hands into a little prayer knot beneath her chin. His brother has stumped her. His brother does that to most people. You could have slept beside him in his mother's belly, and still not fathom all the human drivings which must be at work somewhere, somewhere.

The wind begins tapping at the window, and raising in the chimney a keening between life and death: a howl which is at once one and the other, and in a breath sounds the clans' knells, and in the next cries after its youth. Only winter can with one bay fetch spring in green reminisce to the consumptive's lonely breast and in distant graveyards lower its frozen dead. And here it's only 26 August.

Caroline taps her feet in his lap, and he says at last, resting one hand on her ankle, "You can't beat Nik, Caroline. He destroys everything. Always. It's what he does."

But you cannot present her with an impossibility. A mind that large knows there are infinities beyond the brain's paltry reach: there is a resolution to every puzzle. Because one discovers or does not discover it does not preclude its existence.

"We'll see," she says, and smiles, poking him cheekily in the chin with her toe.

He licks it.

"Gross!"

"I've licked far worse things, darling."

* * *

Two days later, she marches into the room while he's at table, drooping over his breakfast, and lays a paper down flat on the empty plate beside him. "Do you know anything about this?"

It's a clean white sheet, very plain, and folded twice horizontally:

534 C2 13 127 36 31 4 17 21 41

Douglas 109 293 5 37 Birlstone

26 Birlstone 9 47 171

He spares one eye for it, and then returns to feeding his rather voracious hangover some toast. "It's a piece of paper with some gibberish on it."

"It's a cipher message."

"Do you have the cipher?"

"No."

"Then it's gibberish." The toast opens negotiations with his stomach: to the better man goeth victory, etc. Ten shillings on the toast.

"Your brother sent it to me two days ago. It's obviously a reference to a book, more precisely, specific words on a specific page. And two days later I still have neither the book nor the teensiest, tiniest hint as to which book I need to look at." She flaps the paper at him. "And you know nothing about this?"

"I haven't seen Nik in a week. And anyway, darling, do you really think he'd give me the very key to whatever Nefarious Scheme he's trying to draw you into? If he hasn't given you the name of the book, it's because he wants you to sort it out on your own."

She sighs, looks tormented for a moment, Why Me I'm Pretty, God isn't supposed to punish these sorts of specimens; if you've paid any attention whatsoever to humanity's oeuvre, you'll see the victor is always the maiden, and never the wolf.

"Ok. Ok." She brings her hands together underneath her chin and begins to pace. "He cannot expect me to freaking…pluck one book at random from the last thousand years of literature or turn every library upside down attempting to find it. So. So." She turns back and forth along the table, her skirts swishing after her. "It's something common. It's something…most people would have. Something you could easily get ahold of. Not the Bible, because, obviously. The cipher starts with '534', probably a page number, so a large book; that narrows it down a little. C2...C2." She turns round and begins her next row, clapping the tips of her fingers a little beneath her nose. "Not chapter; if we're beginning on page 534, we'd be way past the second chapter."

"You haven't read any of Nik's books, darling, have you? You ought to; they're good for a laugh. He takes copies of them round to all the booksellers and replaces whatever's in the window with his own. He fancies himself a much better poet than he is."

She tilts her heads, and removes her fingers from beneath her nose. "He wouldn't-"

"Force you to read one of his books by means of a cryptic message which would seem to carry some dire warning/prophecy you need to solve before it's too late and all of London is doomed? He absolutely would. But I don't imagine that's what he's getting at."

"C2, then. Column. Column two- yes; that makes much more sense. So, a large book, printed in columns- long ones, since one of the words is listed as the 293rd. A book that has to be common, or else how could he expect me to solve it? And that's what he wants me to do, isn't it; he wants me to play this freaking game. So, double columns, more than 534 pages, and common. And it has to be some kind of standardized text- page 534 in his book is exactly the same as page 534 in mine."

He sits back in his chair; his stomach has triumphed, for the moment. He watches her pace back and forth, back and forth, trailing all her suppositions after her, in a sort of under the breath babbling which suddenly ceases for the moment before the revelation, when she has to freeze for just a moment to let it seep into all the corners of her, and overturn every other observation which plays always at the perimeter of her mind, the ray of sunlight on the table and the fleck of dried blood on his left thumb, the vague lives of the city beyond their window which in making their usual rustlings of existence illuminate for her some unknown extrapolations that lie for him in a sullen murk.

"Not the dictionary- too random, too curt. You'd have trouble sending a message with that."

And then she turns, and she screams, "Almanac!" at him and pops the hands out to either side. "Whitaker's Almanac!"

She's very cute when she deduces.

He's taken up in spite of himself; she just sweeps you along so that the rebelling stomach is forgotten, and the headache resigned to understudy.

She snatches the required book off her shelf and brings it over to the table; he comes out of his chair to bend over the pages as she rifles through to '534', where both of them tap their fingers along the columns, counting off words till number thirteen is reached. 'There," she calls out.

"Is," he replies.

And then 'danger' 'may' 'come 'soon'; he catches up the letter she left on the empty plate beside his half-finished breakfast, and scratches down each word as she calls them out.

"There is danger may come very soon one Douglas rich country now at Birlstone House Birlstone confidence is pressing."

Caroline stands for a moment looking over the sheet of paper, the open almanac forgotten in front of her.

And then: "Get your coat," she snaps, running for her own room. " _Now_."

* * *

 _The reader will forgive if I here pause and scribble down a bit of scenery._

 _Birlstone squats on the northern border of Sussex, where it has lived for centuries. Its humble cottages have for some time sweated against the approach of that abominable weed which society calls the wealthy, who, having been charmed by its woods and chalk downs, now encroach on the harrows and mushrooms._

 _The star around which these lesser beings revolve, trifling crumbs of elegance which have broken with the main nucleus and suffer now at its gilded hem, is the Manor House of Birlstone. It is to this august building our narrative has now turned. In the days of Hugo de Capus the soldiers of the first crusade leant their heads here and dreamt of infidels; in the 16th century God thumbed his nose at this bit of history and sent his fires to obliterate it._

 _But man and his structures are never so quickly defeated; the Jacobeans raised a country house on the very spot, taking some of the charred corner stones for themselves and so incorporating their ancestors into the very foundation of what you can now see for yourself on a ramble through the countryside, very much as it looked in the 17th century, the outer moat having dried out but the inner still guarding for nigh forty feet the original gables and windows._

 _But it's not for this house you have come._

 _We turn our eye, then, to the dogcart rattling at top speed along through the mud toward this house, much to the regret of its sweating bearer. In it are two figures, quite snugly tucked against one another. Dusk is just falling. In the country, dusk is no mere vanishing from grey to black; here every shade of red and no poet's pen to transcribe them. The man is broad-shouldered, handsome, but half-dressed, for a gentlemen, in dapper trousers but with no jacket, and his sleeves turned back to his elbows._

 _She is particularly stunning on this day. There is some shade of gold which might depict for the reader some 1/10th of the impression which her curls must have made on a curious wanderer walking the road at that precipitous hour, but language has not yet invented it. She wears trousers and a man's jacket, tailored to her own slight form, but the hair bounces about her shoulders, hindered by neither pins nor hat._

 _Here the dogcart stops before the manor and then is handily turned round, its charges having alighted. What precisely happens in the house is of no consequence: it is enough to know the man wades up to his thighs in the moat and boosts the woman over the windowsill of a small room to the right of the drawbridge, and afterward pulls himself._

 _There is no shot._

 _Birlstone drowsily watches the sun steal away into its woods, and farther still beyond them._

 _It is here, having prevented His skillful ministrations to Fate, she becomes_ the _woman._

* * *

When she walks into the apartment shaking September 1st from her bonnet, Kol picks up the Eastern Morning News edition lying at his elbow on the breakfast table, and with a snap unfurls it.

He clears his throat.

"Another Whitechapel tragedy. Brutal murder of a woman. The Central News says: 'Following close upon the recent ghastly tragedy in Whitechapel, Londoners were yesterday horrified to hear of a similar outrage perpetrated in a manner which has seldom been equaled for brutality. At a very early hour in the morning a constable on beat duty found lying in Bucks-row, a narrow thoroughfare abutting on Thomas-street, Whitechapel, the dead body of a woman about 40 years of age. The throat was gashed with two cuts, penetrating from the front of the neck to the vertebrae. The body was at once taken to the Whitechapel mortuary, where it was found that the unfortunate victim's abdomen had been ripped up from thighs to breast in a most revolting manner, the intestines protruding from three deep gashes. The clothes were cut and torn in several places, and the face was bruised and much discoloured. The woman's dress seems to show that she was in poor circumstances and marks upon some of the undergarments indicate that she has been an inmate of the Lambeth Workhouse. This summarises the facts of the case. All besides, is in profound mystery. And so forth and so on, we humbly submit our outrage for this woman we from our moral pinnacles spit at, unless she's on fire, etc. etc. Sound like your department, darling?"

But whether it is or is not her department lies unuttered on her lips because at the door there is a sudden thrumming, tentative and rapped out at the height of her chest: the page Billy, then.

She opens the door.

"Telegram for you, ma'am," he says, handing it over. "And there's a hansom downstairs. Says he's to take you to Scotland Yard."

She exchanges a look with Kol. "I didn't call a cab."

"I can dismiss him, if you like?" Billy ventures.

But she holds up one hand and she opens the telegram and here the mystery unravels in Lestrade's blocky printing which urges her at once to drop all momentary concerns and hurry to the station on a matter of 'no small importance'.

"Tell the driver I'll be down in a moment," she says, and sees him out the door.

"The Scotland Yard dress?" Kol asks, already standing. He throws back the remainder of his coffee.

"The Scotland Yard dress," she confirms.

* * *

You have to remember, all these eyes, all these men, and stroll in like before you lies only one long hall, and at its end your throne.

She takes one deep breath.

She lets Kol open the door for her, and then she sweeps inside this storm of typewriters which raise in each corner a flurry of grapeshot, and from down the corridor to the left there drifts the cries of the suspects who moan from their 9th circle all the protestations which only a guilty man can submit, there was never a purer babe to walk the earth, and through these maelstroms of man and machine the looks fished up from every nook and cranny, so that you must greet them chin up, chest out, and spin the lacy parasol you can't put down, you will not let them make you some honorary man, an otherly creature, neither girl nor boy, an in-between, they will know every flirty twist of your wrist, and the swish of each silken layer.

"Hello, darling," Kol says, and pinches the butt of one particularly bitch-eyed constable who tries to glare her back into her tea room.

And then they turn the corner, past the evidence room, beyond the mortuary, to the left of the hall where Inspector Lestrade keeps his tidy little office.

The door is open.

"Let me see your best 'I can see all the way through to your tiny cock' smile," Kol tells her.

She obliges.

"Excellent, darling."

He walks through first, and just for a moment eclipses her view.

And then she clears the doorway and she sees a man seated in front of Lestrade, his back to the door, but she knows this head, she knows the curls, unkempt, Kol usually slicks back his own hair but this man- this man wants you to see he has had no hand in his attractiveness, God just sort of swept in and said, 'and so he was perfect' and rolled him from bed to frock coat with the hair disheveled, not so you'd mistake him for any shamble-footed vagabond, plying the tender hearts of silk-hatted ladies, but with just that touch of casualness, so you know: oh, this old thing? It just came that way.

" _You_ ," she snaps.

Lestrade looks up from Kol's hand, which he has gripped a little too hard: you always have to prove your manliness around one of those sodomites, after all. "Ah, Miss Forbes. I'm pleased you could make it so quickly." He isn't. He's smiling through his teeth.

But Klaus stands and turns to her with an entirely genuine smile, his most cherubic dimples in both cheeks. "Miss Forbes; so pleased to see you." He holds out one hand as if to take hers, coming around his chair with his hat in the other.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she demands.

Lestrade sits back in his chair, looking amused. "Ah, yes, Mr. Mikaelson; Miss Forbes' theories about you are a bit of an inside joke here at Scotland Yard. It's possible you've heard you are apparently the most dangerous and well-connected criminal in all of London?"

Klaus smiles ruefully. "I hear rather the entirety of England. Perhaps even the world. But that's all right. Whatever she thinks of me, I humbly submit to her judgements." He bows a little. "It's quite all right, inspector. We've had a bit of a misunderstanding between the two of us in the past, but there's no one else I'd rather you consult on this gruesome business."

"A _misunderstanding_?" she nearly shrieks, and in the corner where he's taken over a chair for himself, and sits slouched and twirling one of his cuff links between his knuckles (he can never keep them on), Kol puts his hand to his nose and then drops it beneath his chin.

She takes another breath.

He has already gotten so completely too much satisfaction from her, so she steels her shoulders, she sets her parasol in the corner, she sits down in the chair next to him and folds her hands primly in her lap, and not for one single second does she look at him as he seats himself once more, his knee touching hers.

She does keep an eye out for any opportunity to stomp his foot beneath the jagged little heel of her boot.

With ears alone she takes in Lestrade's monologue as he begins to expound on the murder Kol rattled off to her from the Eastern Morning News. Mary Ann Nichols, also called 'Polly', inmate of Lambeth Workhouse for seven years, killed elsewhere and later deposited where her discoverers found her, in the opinion of the doctor who examined her on-site.

She shuts out the squeaking of Kol's chair as he swings it back and forth, pushing off the wall with his feet, and the quiet susurration of distant reports, all these niggling commotions that intrude on every mind and, elbows out, jostle for their spot in the queue, these she takes and she sweeps aside, narrowing in on him.

It's almost the Downtrodden Clerk mask he wore to her apartment; but there are shades of distinction between them. There he was left-handed, here, he leads with his right when he gestures; it was the right he offered to her in greeting. There is a note of earnestness in his voice: Daddy's little liberal benefactor, patron of the poor, throwing his pounds at the slums as if in snowing them down beneath the weight of all these donations, he can lift them somehow above their silt.

He lets some of his charm through into his voice; this he subtracted from the Downtrodden Clerk, this he adds in now, not so you can feel there is a subterranean sort of menace behind it, lurking in those depths of mankind where slink all the subcutaneous whispers of vice, a young charm, a charm with roses in its cheeks, vaguely aware of its own attractions, having not yet harnessed them, but taking advantage naturally. He means every word he says; he leans forward, into the table, into that zone where you are taken from participant to intimate; there's no artifice; Lestrade, who has seen it in all its many and varied shades, and cuffed it all the same, suns himself in its glow.

He has a smudge of charcoal on his right thumb.

She looks at this from the corner of her eye as Lestrade continues on and on and Kol thumps his chair back against the wall and from the street there is a hansom driver's enraged cry, and these she takes, and she tucks them away, she runs over the angle of the smudge, the age of it, how its worked its way into his cuticle and finely dusted the nail and the faint impression of the same mark on his right pointer finger.

She thinks: something real.

She thinks: something he wanted her to see. Something he wanted her to watch lift its head from underneath Mr. Mikaelson: Social Reformer and with one saucy blink draw her on.

So.

Fine.

She leans forward, onto the desk, mirroring his pose, resting her fingers beneath his chin.

"It was Mr. Mikaelson insisted we call you in, Miss Forbes. There's hardly any need for your presence at the moment, it's most likely one of the High Rip gangs, of course, and it won't be long before one of them informs. But, of course, Mr. Mikaelson, Scotland Yard well understands your concerns and is happy to help alleviate them," Lestrade informs her.

Klaus puts a fist to his mouth for a moment, clearly overcome. "I'm sorry, Inspector. I knew this woman from my visits to the workhouse where she lived, and it's absolutely horrendous. Those poor women, out on those bloody streets, with no other choice, and to come- to come to that sort of end." He shakes his head."

"A friend of yours?" she asks crisply.

"Well, I'd hardly call her that, Miss Forbes, we met once or twice, but, as you may know, I've done some work in such quarters. I'm building another workhouse, one with which we aim to improve upon the old model, a place where cheap lodgings can be had without the squalor, without those terrible exploitations of their brethren. If these women could afford to lay their head under a roof, they wouldn't be out on the streets exposing themselves to such vile dangers."

"You are certainly a contribution to humanity. It's England's fortune you were born here."

He pretends to completely miss her sarcasm. "Thank you," he says, and slides this bashful little smile across the desk to Lestrade. "Seems we might bury the hatchet after all, hmm?"

For just a moment, she cannot handle her inability to strangle him in front of God and half the Metropolitan force, and turns to scrunch her nose at Kol, who, bored the second Lestrade opened his mouth, is now intent on the ripostes between her and his brother.

He lifts his eyebrows.

There is a piece of hair, at the nape of Klaus' neck. One stiff clock spring of blonde he touches sometimes: Social Reformer Klaus is a bit fidgety, he doesn't have that stillness of the man from her apartment, he doesn't have that otherworldly silence, an inhuman thing, a thing you find in houses gone unloved for years. You think, looking at him, he could sit for five mercurial centuries, letting the ivy grow over him while history shifts and shifts again and whole cities die and in a decade spring from new and better fingers.

She can find a thread of it, in this Klaus. In some imperceptible movement of his elbow, you see the shade of past gestures, and then it's gone.

She sees the charcoal smudge on his thumb: she sees that, and nothing else.

His clothes have only the itinerant spices of autumnal London, soot, dirt, the smells which have risen up from the Thames and whispered in slow driftings over its people. The hems of his trousers are splashed with that distinct clay of Clay Hill, but it's a false lead: the splatter of it is just slightly off, not thrown up by passing hooves or his own shoes, but smeared on by hand, so that even his pants take her off somewhere to wander in confused ravings.

She rises gracefully from her chair. "Do you have the woman's belongings here?"

"Hmm?" Lestrade asks, looking up from his conversation with Klaus, which has progressed on without her, as most conversations between men do.

"Mary Ann Nichols? Do you have her belongings here? Her clothes, anything she had on her when she died?"

"Oh; yes, of course. But that won't do you much good, Miss Forbes; of course we've already identified her, and she wasn't carrying much. Certainly nothing of significance."

Klaus has sat back in his chair, and folded his hands beneath his chin. For just an instant, you see him flicker to the surface: he looks at her rather than Lestrade when he speaks, and she feels this thing.

She doesn't want to say a shiver.

"Let her be the judge of that."

* * *

He stands in the doorway of the evidence room watching her.

She turns over a white handkerchief in her hands, reading in it what men cannot parse.

About her feet splash the yards of blue satin, foaming round the delicate toes which flirt from beneath it; she has done up her hair as for a ball. The gloved hands turn the deceased's articles over and over; the magnifying glass trawls each corner and seam for its hidden cache, panning at streambeds where the mere mortal has long since cast off his hope with his sieve.

He clasps his hands behind his back.

He wets his lips.

He steps forward with a smile.

He leans in so close he can smell the rosewater on her neck, and drops his voice so no straining ear may hear what is only for her, there is only the two of them, he wants her to understand, yes, yes, somewhere a world of sweating humanity toiling away at its survival, but when he enters a room, love, what you may sense with your peripheral vision and hear faintly belling in your ears is but cake frippery.

She does not tense when his nose grazes her neck. The handkerchief is set aside in favor of a comb, and this too is thrust beneath the glass, where its tines loom fantastically.

"I hear you received my message? It would seem poor Birlstone lives to see another day."

"How are your testicles?" she asks with an edge in her voice, turning over the comb.

He smiles. "Fully recovered, if you're inquiring for reasons of personal interest."

She does not engage with that; pity.

He pulls back now, keeping his hands clasped, and pacing in ever narrowing loops as a predator might run down its prey, so that she must filter out the clicking of his heels on the floor, and shuck off that instinctive rime which frosts the boldest of hearts in his presence, cringing, as they ought, before those communal nightmares of all humans, which see in him the faceless terrors of those woodland loams to whom midnight applies its most threatening violets.

"It's not a gang," he says, staying always just out of her peripheral vision, so she must feel rather than see him. "I would know. I own most of them."

"Is it you?" she asks sweetly, still not bothering to turn her head, and now retrieving the scrap of looking glass from the box where the last human bits of Mary Ann Nichols have been stowed.

"It's a bit sloppy, don't you think, sweetheart? I'm certain you think better of me than that. The police do not find my corpses. Unless I deem their discovery useful." He stops just behind her, leaning in once more. "Murder of this sort is very messy. I don't recommend taking a stab at it."

He waits for her laughter.

Instead, she turns round and pins on him such a look as would shrink a lesser man. "Really? _Really_?"

He likes how her indignation puffs her up; very fetching. He has somewhere in his palette a recreation of her cheek, but merely a pallid copy, and no hand, even his own, which can coax it to truer similitude.

"Your deductions, Miss Forbes?"

"None of your business. What is your interest in this anyway? We both know you can drop the fawn-eyed crap about your workhouse charity. Did she work for you?"

"I'm not a pimp; men of my abilities do not descend to such base crassness. But it does occasionally happen that these women, eager for an extra shilling or three, may be persuaded to yield up all the various sweet nothings which less cautious men let slip. And all men are less cautious in the throes of passion, with a whore for a bedfellow. Where, after all, has this fallen woman to turn? Surely not to anyone of significance. Who hears her secrets? The walls of her abode, sole ear to her drunken ramblings?"

"So you use them as spies. Blackmail? Charming."

He dimples. "I'm pleased you think so."

"You really need to stop pretending that I'm complimenting you."

He has stepped in close enough that she must either shrink back against the table or, in standing her ground, press herself indecently to his chest; she does not yield, as he predicted, and stands nose to nose with him, coldly, both arms crossed over her breast, and the magnifying glass tapping impatiently against her elbow. "I trust you're properly intrigued?" he asks, lifting an eyebrow.

"I would rather be this man's next victim than work for you."

Ah, but you see she's captivated; minds such as this do not merely skim the surfaces of such conundrums, leave a bit of foam in their wake, ascend once more to sturdier shores. Already she turns it about in her mind, ascertaining from whence trickles all its tells: perhaps the realm of spirits roams in free anonymity, but man leaves his prints in the dust, no matter how scanty his heel.

She steps back so that she may circle him now, tapping the magnifying glass, looking at him from beneath her long lashes; he turns in sync with her to mirror her steps, hands still behind his back, the smile growing on his face as she cocks her head and, having failed to glean from the press of his trousers and the buttons on his vest anything which he does not want her to foretell, asks instead, "Do you think they're being targeted precisely because they're your employees, or simply because they're prostitutes, any old lunatic who can keep it together for three seconds can lure them off into a dark alley?"

"Either way, my employees are dying by a hand not my own."

She rolls her eyes.

"You know," she says, and resumes her pacing. "It might be easier for me to tackle this case if somebody hadn't destroyed my analysis table. Also? Your brother broke my microscope while he was playing with it."

"Yes, Kol can be somewhat trying. You should never let him touch anything." He stops.

And this too she mirrors, turning so they are once more face to face, all the color in her cheeks now, and in her eyes the spark of something which he may be so bold as to call a beginning.

* * *

When she returns home from the mortuary, her chemicals have all been replaced; there's an entire bundle of pipettes on the work table.

And beside this: a brand new Powell & Lealand with a bow around it.

* * *

Next morning, Caroline wakes him by tearing the blanket off him. "Up, up, up, up, up!" she calls, now wrenching open the curtains. London, having recklessly allied itself with her, stabs him in the eye with a ray of sunlight.

In the sitting room, a mug of tea and a piece of toast are each thrust into his hand, the shirt he has haphazardly buttoned set to rights, a tie thrown and rapidly knotted round his neck.

"It's eight o'clock in the morning," he tells her, blinking.

"I know; I let you sleep in. And as a thank you, you're going to go through all of these," she says, and onto the breakfast table she deposits a stack of newspapers which shudders the entire structure; the floor lists as in a storm. "That's Enzo and Tim," she calls out half a second before the bell sounds downstairs.

"Who's Tim?" he asks.

Tim, it happens, is the man he saw some days ago, in his shirtsleeves and Donegal, one of Caroline's many unofficial agents which she has trained and ranged about the streets of London so it may not so much as breathe without lifting her bright and nosy head towards its stirrings.

He's a good half a foot taller than Enzo, and hangs back while customary greetings commence between Caroline and her favourite Irregular; brown-haired, a sandy sort of hue, from what he can make out beneath the hat, and with the end of it curling at the nape of his neck, an untamable piece at which its owner scratches in agitation.

The blue eyes are framed with lashes Bekah would envy, and the shaved cheeks smooth as a child's; a boyish twenty-four, he wagers.

His profile is stunning.

"Kol Mikaelson," he says, coming forward with his hand out to get a look at the entire thing.

"Tim O'Sullivan," Caroline replies for him, grabbing both their hands as they move to shake the other and flinging them back toward their respective owners. "Now. Boys. Murderers don't just spring out of the ether fully formed. So. This man must have some sort of rehearsal, maybe an earlier murder, maybe some assaults- we're looking for anything with any sort of passing resemblance to the recent mutilations in Whitechapel. He spent some time refining this. Set aside anything involving stabbings with no apparent motive, any violent attacks against prostitutes, all of it, I want it here." She slaps the table with her hand. "We'll go back to the beginning of this year, and then farther back, if necessary. Enzo." She heaves another stack onto the table.

Tim appears slightly overwhelmed; it's a good look for him, very crinkly about the eyes.

"Kol." She taps the one with which she opened his morning, and beside it adds a third, pointing at Tim; he jumps a bit. "I want your findings alphabetized, and in chronological order. Understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," Enzo drawls, but facetiously; Tim is not so jaunty about his answer, and mutely nods.

"I don't see a fourth stack, darling. Are you merely cracking the whip today?"

"Nope; I have errands to take care of. Be back in an hour, and you can all present me with your findings then."

* * *

There are two incidences which Caroline deems noteworthy.

The first is from the 25th of February, which saw 38-year-old widow Annie Millwood admitted to the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary for stab wounds to the legs and lower part of her abdomen, inflicted (in her own somewhat tipsy words) by a strange man who took out a clasp knife and stabbed her.

On March 28th, 39-year-old 'dressmaker' Ada Wilson opened her door to a man about 30, around 5' 6", fair moustache and sunburnt face who threatened to kill her if she didn't give him money, and, when refused, stabbed her twice in the throat. Ada's neighbors, being somewhat skeptical of the legitimacy of any dressmaker who caters to an all-male clientele in those blistery morning hours of butchers and candlestick makers (ought he to have resisted that?), have added to the reports their own interpretations of the victim's career.

Caroline paces in front of the table, tapping her chin. "Ok. She's our most likely connection, then, but I'll send someone around to ask at the Infirmary about Millwood too. She's dead now, but there must be a record somewhere of the attack, and maybe someone still on staff who personally treated her." She spins round toward Tim, and says, quite abruptly, "Take off your clothes."

"What? Me clothes?" Tim freezes over the stack he's still sifting through. He's a nice soft accent, touch of Dublin in it, and in its foundations something farther south that he can't place.

"You too, Enzo," she adds, and Enzo, ever obedient, only shrugs and begins to divest himself of his trousers. He's lamentably free of sodomistic urges, but a perfect eye full, which he leans back to enjoy, putting up his feet on the heap of papers he's given up halfway through, and which Tim has undertaken to finish.

Tim looks at him.

"You heard what she said, darling." He settles in to watch; Tim has a set of shoulders on him which he is quite sure will prove a perfectly commendable leg rest once naked.

Caroline has dashed off to her room and returned with a police uniform thrown over either arm; the left she hands to Enzo, and the right to Tim, who remains defiantly clothed. Absolute rubbish, if you ask him.

"Enzo, you're off to the infirmary at the workhouse. You will ask these questions." She thrusts a notebook at him. "Tim, you're going to interrogate Ada Wilson and any chatty neighbors." She pushes another notebook into his dumb hands, which have only just accepted the uniform and hang now woodenly uncertain of their mechanical duties. "Oh, wait! Sorry; I forgot you're actually a nice man with a sense of modesty. I'm used to Kol."

"I resent that," he says.

"You're complimented by that. Anyway," she continues, turning to Tim, and shooing him along with clucking tongue and little flaps of her hands, "you can change in my room, on the right. Don't use Kol's; he'll 'just so happen' to remember he needs something in there and walk in on you."

"This is a terrible assassination of my character," he assures Tim.

"Move!" Caroline demands, clapping her hands sharply, and skittering Tim on ahead of her as if fleeing a hunter, or perhaps a plague. "Enzo, sit in that chair; it's time for your makeup."

* * *

She sends Enzo and Tim off to their respective tasks, moustached, balding, Tim badly pox-scarred on his left cheek, Enzo with a mole on his right.

She walks George Yard in a jacket and trousers with Kol and his three pistols (sometimes you just need options, darling, he told her while secreting them all over). Lestrade and his men will have trampled everything, of course, and the thousands of shambling lives afterward which leave all their existence in their wake.

But there's always something to be learned. You can press your ear to the ground and listen to all ten thousand revelations shiver up from its soil, if you're willing, if you say to the voice which points out all the tread and re-tread trails that merge, mingle, shoot off in random directions, shh, shh, _listen_.

She lies down where the woman died.

Imagine: there is this fathomless dark, somewhere in some other world there is this rumored 'sun', and the hills put up their heads to touch it. But here you just pass from dark darker darkest and back again and if in daylight you're followed by all those normal hauntings of full noon you never even notice, the dress swishing round your heels and the cabs bellowing past, every ill-fated child with their hands hopefully in your pockets, here every myth stirs, shakes off its dust, roars from every niche and alley to turn against you your own beating heart.

She shuts her eyes.

Kol has kneeled beside her, but she doesn't notice that, she registers the warmth near her right side, she hears him push both of his hands into his pockets, she forgets all that.

So you pass through all these layers of dark dark darkest, each boom of your heart leaping you from one to the next, and that ever-present threat of your own footsteps, turning you around and around again, but ahead: this spit of land after a fatal sea.

You reach the George Yard Buildings and maybe you lean your hands on your knees; you take a deep breath.

She opens her eyes.

"There wasn't a struggle," she says aloud. "Nobody heard anything. She got here safely. She didn't live here, but she wasn't being pursued." She leaps to her feet. Kol watches her from where he's kneeling, hands still in his pockets. "She had a drinking problem, so. She's squandered the last of her earnings on alcohol." She turns toward the front of the tenement, puts out her hand to touch it. "She stops for a moment to lean on the building. And in the interim, she's strangled, and stabbed thirty nine times. Why would you stab someone thirty nine times?"

"Because I'm very angry with them," Kol replies.

"Exactly. But if this same man murdered Mary Ann Nichols, it wasn't Martha Tabram he was angry with."

She whisks out her magnifying glass and kneels next to Kol, going over each inch of the steps and all the surrounding area one painful centimeter at a time, crawling along through the soot and the horse manure and at intervals stopping to lay nearly flat, with her nose half an inch from the street.

It isn't until nearly twilight that they reach Buck's Row; Kol unbuttons his jacket and displays one of his pistols openly.

She repeats her whole meticulous process while the sun retires and the lamps are lit and there begins to slither from the alleyways and side streets the worst of the surrounding districts.

She paces around the spot where Mary Ann Nichols was left, measuring and examining and from every corner of the stable yard and the narrow street leading to it running the glass, touching the cobblestones with her fingers, remarking every stray fleck and smear.

Kol stands somewhere behind her back the entire time, watching the passersby, and whipping out his murder credentials every time someone lingers suspiciously: "My brother is Satan, At Your Service Mikaelson" he probably says, and escorts them on their way.

But once he threw a client out their window for calling her an 'impudent slut' and of the guy who tried to revenge himself by bombing her hansom at Scotland Yard after the arrest of one of his associates, there remains no precise trail of his last moments; pieces of him are still washing up on the Thames. So maybe he says simply, "Hello, darling; Kol Miakelson," and they run for their lives.

He likes it when they run for their lives.

He must get it from his brother.

"So?" Kol asks her in the hansom on their way home.

"I'm thinking," she says, and settles back into the cushions.

* * *

Enzo and Tim have brought back nothing the newspapers have not already sensationalized, but there is a telegram waiting for her from He Whom She Refuses To Name.

It's full of little dancing men, articulated stick figures posed in a variety of ways, and at the bottom, his ridiculous flourish of a signature, just 'Klaus', because of course a second name is for the poor and law-abiding.

"Can your brother write a normal message?!" she snaps, and sits down to decipher it.

* * *

 _The Ten Bells pub is located at the corner of Commercial and Church Streets and in our contemporary times now enjoys some small measure of fame in connection with the case I here recount. However, in this autumn of 1888, it was merely another Whitechapel fixture, unremarkable peddler of rum, issuing from its windows the raucous laughter and copious lighting of any thriving business. To the description 'clean' we must add 'suitably enough' and content ourselves with this grim yardstick of relativity._

 _It stands in the company of several other such establishments, and marks a standard point on the journey of any street woman plying her trade, tavern pavements being a commendable wellspring for those drunk and pliable clients by which a lady makes her living. To reach the door, you must circumvent several of them. Such revelations will further serve our narrative in future pages, but for now it is merely a notable fact with which I dress my stage._

 _In the far corner, in the very back of the pub, behind a table of seamen, there is a man; you know him well. At this stage in our tale you will have been granted merely a tantalising glimpse, but of course you have read of his past exploits, for who of any small literary ability will not have found himself drawn to this remarkable Mars?_

 _It is here, however, you may feel your first flicker of pity in place of reverence. I have never known him to speak of love; too long was there a stone in place of a heart, a foundation of machinations where another man might have sewn tenderness, and walked softly in its path. Love art for men; to call Him such is to pluck the wings from Chronos._

 _But he had…something for this woman. A seed, once planted, if forgotten, left unwatered, will nevertheless put down roots, and with every cunning endeavour to lift its first tender shoot in quest of life, and so too did something in him lean towards her now, seeking perhaps warmth, friendship, a duality which in her he sensed, or, perhaps, wished to sense._

 _Truth be told, he was lonely._

 _Let us not humanise him. Does the devil not have his rainy afternoons, does he not gaze upon the latest soul put to his rack and feel in himself neither pleasure, neither pain, does he not feel where his sensations ought to lie and find in their place a sort of frost- neither frost, but something colder still, which stuns from him every fleeting joy?_

 _But he checked his pocket watch ten times in as many minutes and for twice that length of time wrestled the folds of his jacket, and nervously adjusted his tie._

 _To be a customer at the moment of her entrance._

 _To see the door open on what must be merely another labourer and instead the shining hair, the blue eyes, the lips, the face which shares none of its qualities with the common detective, jaded to his lot, who views with foggy disinterest the sobbing beggar and his dishevelled mother. In her there is a softness, a supreme sympathy; in her there is a heart of which he might have conceived in his long distant childhood, when he dreamt into his mother that tenderness which to children and their fancies is for some time a worthy replacement._

 _He stands involuntarily._

 _For him the seamen and the whores have ceased to exist. Their laughter has vanished, the barman after it, into this maw go the gaslights, the hansoms, the pervasive stink of soot and sweat._

 _Perhaps it is then he ought to have known, but never are we competent diagnosers of our own frailties._

* * *

"Caroline," he says, and pulls out a chair for her.

She does not take it. She snaps, "Could you maybe send me a normal telegram like a human instead of acting like the very freaking embodiment of a moustache-twirling sensation literature villain?"

He takes his own chair and sits with his elbows upon the table, resting his fingers under his chin. "Would you care to know why you're here, love?"

"Don't call me that."

There is a certain angle at which she tilts her head to emphasize her irritation; it's quite captivating.

He smiles, looking up at her from beneath his brows.

It takes some time; in Caroline Forbes there is an unflensed core of steel which neither time nor chauvinism have whittled, and with great reluctance bends; for nearly an entire minute they look at one another, she tapping her fingers against the arms she has crossed over her breast, he patiently waiting with his pointer fingers beneath his bottom lip.

At last she takes the chair.

"A woman called Mary Ann Connelly, street alias 'Pearly Poll', claimed to have been in the presence of Martha Tabram, whom she knew as 'Emma', on the Bank Holiday night which saw her demise."

"I'm aware."

"They were in the company of two soldiers, guardsmen, a corporal and a private; the private and Tabram advanced to George Yard when the foursome split up round 11.45. Poll, either through artifice or that muzzy veil of drunkenness under which she no doubt conducted her business, failed to identify either her own client or that of Tabram. However." He leans back in his chair with some satisfaction, smiling at her. "You may have remarked I have some avenues of inquiry open to me which our dear Inspector Lestrade has neither the wherewithal nor the stomach to exploit."

She folds her hands on the table; he can see at war within her that professional curiosity and the natural derision which she heaps upon the head of talents such as his. "You found them?"

"I have it on good authority the private has recently been discharged from military duty and counts this pub among his favourite watering holes."

"I don't think you have anything on 'good' authority. Is he here now?"

"Not yet." He leans forward once more. "But that's to our fortune. Had a sniff round Buck's Row and the George Yard Buildings today, hmm?"

"Kol told you."

"Kol tells me nothing I do not already know. Let's have a crack at your own methods, shall we?" He steeples his fingers again. "These are clearly your 'deducting' clothes. You've not bothered to change, which means you've come nearly straight from an investigation and in all eagerness, if I may flatter myself, to see me."

"You may not."

He ignores that. "You're therefore on the scent of something. Perhaps only a theory, but you're turning over some possibility or another. You won't have drawn any conclusions without acquainting yourself with the facts of the case. Martha Tabram was killed nearly a month ago; any traces of the killer will have long vanished, but not for you. Nichols is fresh; you'll have been in even more eagerness to examine the site of her murder. My telegram said only 'The Tens Bells 10 o'clock'. You turned straight round and came here after decoding it on nothing stronger than the name of a pub and an appointed time, which means you anticipated something more than just the pleasure of my company. You want to know what information I have, whether it supports or obliterates your own theories, which you have not spun sitting in your armchair at 221B as you've solved so many a seemingly hopeless knot, or else you wouldn't be here. No." He licks his bottom lip and lowers his voice to that intimate level of the confidante. "This is something new, even for you, isn't it, Miss Forbes?"

She sits in absolute silence for a moment.

"Nothing is new in the annals of crime. Not even you. The evil London overlord has already been done. Jonathon Wild, Adam Worth?"

"Mere prototypes." He waves his hand. "I'm something else altogether."

She bites her bottom lip in contemplation of this, without wavering for a second in her scrutiny of him. "You might be. But Jonathon Wild and Adam Worth never had a Caroline Forbes."

"No," he says softly. "I suppose they hadn't."

* * *

He just snaps his fingers suddenly, and two men materialize out of the crowd to snatch a man just coming through the door.

They're sparring when the man enters the pub; he's trying to trip her on his dimples, and she is giving him all her very best Not Here For It. He looks at her like…she doesn't want to say. Not like an opponent. You almost see something human in him; there's this surfacing in his eyes. If Matt had looked at her like that she'd have slept away her best years in America, with his children in her arms, and she thinks careful, careful: tiptoe so, so gingerly through this.

And yet still he sees the man.

He doesn't even take his eyes off her face; he sits back in his chair. He snaps his fingers, and the barman looks up, the sailors in front of them briefly turn around, for a moment even the smoke pauses, and hangs in wary indecision near the ceiling.

The man is dragged kicking and yelling to their table and everyone looks from Klaus to elsewhere.

"What the bloody _fuck_?" he demands.

"You're in the presence of a lady, mate, let's watch our tongue, shall we?" Klaus says mildly enough, and then he leans in, he lowers his voice, he hovers his lips half an inch from the man's ear, he gives him such a caressing look. He says, "It wouldn't be the first I've cut out for impertinence."

There is no disbelieving him.

The man goes still.

"Caroline," Klaus says, without pulling back from the man, close enough to kiss him, close enough that the man must feel the breath on his neck, must feel in his chest, in his throat, this natural little quailing. "May I present to you Private John Sholto?"

"How do you know who I am? I don't know you; I've never seen you in my life!"

"That's hardly important, John. May I call you that?" he asks, clasping the man intimately round the neck, and giving him a smile that's most definitely felled a woman or two in its day. "Listen very carefully, John. You're going to answer any questions this ravishing young woman puts to you, without hesitation, without any attempt at deceit." He shakes the man a little. "Hmm? I don't see any reason you can't walk out of here with all your limbs intact, do you? Your brother's stupidity isn't genetic, so let's conduct ourselves with a bit more sense. I'm having a very nice evening." He looks pointedly at her, turning the dimples now from John and back again. "I'd hate to sully it with something so crass as splenetic fluid. You just can't get that out of your shirt. Trust me, mate, I've tried."

Private John Sholto has gone very stiff; she can see his heart beating in his throat, how his sweat rises to his brow, his upper lip, all the little nooks and crannies that first reveal their fear, and with a slow tightening of his hands around the edge of the table he croaks out, "Jimmy…Jimmy's…that was you?"

"What did you do to his brother?" she demands.

Klaus makes this faux regretful face. "Isn't there any mystery in romance anymore, love?"

"This isn't a romance? Do you think you're freaking courting me?"

He doesn't answer; he just smiles and he lets loose of the poor guy's neck and once more he leans back in his chair and puts together his fingers, raising both his eyebrows at her.

"Let me see your hands," she says at last, and John thrusts them obediently out, glancing nervously to Klaus.

She examines the nails, turns his hands over for a moment, asks him, "Are you wearing the same boots you had on when you met with Martha Tabram?", and when he answers positively, she says, "May I see them?"

She goes over the boots with first her eyes and then the glass, touches a nick on the heel, and, handing them back, says to Klaus, "He had nothing to do with it." She turns to the man. "You can go. He won't hurt you."

Private John Sholto scurries away.

"Interesting," Klaus says without unsteepling his fingers. "It's been nearly a month since Martha Tabram died. Have his hands and boots really so well preserved the traces of that night?"

"It's not what he did then; it's what he's done in the meantime," she replies without bothering to elaborate, and stands. "We're done. Don't have a good night."

"I trust my brother is lurking somewhere nearby to see you safely home?" he asks as she turns around, and she allows herself this one tiny smile, which she turns back to let him see in its full and perky smugness. "He's been here the whole time," she says, and for this tiny, tiny moment, she gets to bask in the divine glow of his flabbergasted face.

It clears her skin.

A middle-aged sailor slips away from the bar and limps up to them, favoring his right leg.

"That's a nice touch," she says.

"Thank you," Kol replies in his own voice. "Hello, Nik," he says, and leans over the table to tweak his brother's nose.

"Well," she chirps, taking the arm Kol holds out to her, "I guess we know who's better at disguises, don't we?"

And then she turns, and she flounces out of the bar.

* * *

 **A/N: Coming soon: Prostitute Enzo, Klaus tries to date Caroline by kidnapping a child, Kol being Kol, and, oh yeah, more mutilated corpses. We'll see Elijah and Rebekah at some point, too.**

 **The intention is to dip into the middle of the canon, after the Sherlock/Watson dynamic has already been long established, but I will later touch somewhat on how Caroline's sidekick came to be the younger brother of her archnemesis. (Spoiler alert: because it makes Klaus' eye twitch a little.)**

 **Also, can anyone venture a guess as to the identity of Klaus' fawning, overdramatic 'biographer'? lmao**


	2. Part Two

**A/N: All newspaper extracts are real. Also, the telegram Caroline receives is a (slightly) modified version of a message from Doyle's 'The Sign of Four'. I think I said this in the previous part, but just assume all document extracts are lifted from actual historical sources or Doyle's canon itself, unless otherwise specified.**

 **As in the first part, this is basically just one ridiculously long winky face at Doyle's original canon and the year of 1888 in general. I'll warn for graphic murder descriptions, but if you're reading this, you're probably at least vaguely familiar with the Ripper murders and how gruesome they were, and probably will not be surprised. Just be aware, I don't gloss over that; we're talking literally medical examiner levels of graphic (I may have read all the inquests on the murders). There are also some pretty gruesome details about other serial killers as well. Here is where you marvel at my criminal knowledge (and cringe, and never cross me).**

 **BTW, this site's formatting sucks for mixed media. Also, the line, 'He lost a brother there once' is a dig at TO; I won't explain it for the people who have somewhat followed the show and want to think about the burn, but if you don't follow the show, obviously that line will probably lose you a bit.**

* * *

 **The Whitechapel Tragedy**

The inquest on the body of Mary Ann Nichols, who was found murdered in Whitechapel on Friday morning last, was resumed yesterday morning before Mr. Wynne Baxter, the coroner for East Middlesex. Inspectors Sparklin and Helson gave evidence, describing the wounds and the clothing worn by the deceased. Inspector Helson stated that all the wounds could have been inflicted while the deceased wore her stays. He was of the opinion that the murder was committed on the spot. William Nichols said that deceased was his wife. She left him about seven years ago, and was given to drink. He believed she had been living with various men…

…There was a rumour of an arrest having taken place yesterday in connection with the Whitchapel murder; but, on inquiry of the police authorities this morning, we were informed that there was no truth in the report…

While the coroner's court adjourned for luncheon this afternoon, our representative again visited the scene of the murder, where crowds of persons were still congregated, gazing at the place with a morbid interest. Mr. William Perkins, of Essex Wharf, father of the young man whose statement has already been given, states that at three o'clock his daughter opened the bedroom window of the house where they live - only twelve feet from where the deceased woman was discovered, and there was then the greatest stillness…

 **Murder As a Fine Art**

The crimes of ferocity recently committed in Whitechapel are similar to those which terrified the East-end nearly eighty years ago. The murders in Ratcliffe-highway, which alarmed London in the winter of 1812, are described with cunning hand in the postscript to De Quincey's essay, "Murder as a Fine Art." In the blood-thirstiness of the deeds, in the rapidity of succession, in the curious working around the same limited period, there will be found many points of resemblance between the recent deeds in Whitechapel and the exploits of John Williams in Ratcliffe-highway...

Up to half-past eleven this morning no one had been arrested for the murder of the woman Nicholls. The common lodging-houses in the neighborhood are being carefully guarded night and day, and every place where the suspected criminal may be lurking is watched with equal closeness…

 **The Whitechapel Murder**

From inquiries made at a late hour last night, it has been ascertained that no arrests have been effected in connexion with this mystery, but there are reasons to believe that the detectives are possessed of important information…

 **Police Report signed John Spratling**

…her throat had been cut from left to right, two different cuts being on left side, the windpipe, gullet and spinal cord being cut through; a bruise apparently of a thumb being on right lower jaw, also one on left cheek; the abdomen had been cut open from centre of bottom of ribs along right side, under pelvis to left of stomach, there the wound was jagged; the omentum, or coating of the stomach, was also cut in several places…

 **A Revolting Murder Another Woman Found Horribly Mutilated In Whitechapel. Ghastly Crimes By A Maniac.**

In each case the victim has been a woman of abandoned character, each crime has been committed in the dark hours of the morning, and more important still as pointing to one man, and that man a maniac, being the culprit, each murder has been accompanied by hideous mutilation…

* * *

"He's not a maniac," Caroline says to him one evening with her fingers beneath her nose, pacing before the fireplace.

At moments such as these, he is not expected to say anything; Caroline merely requires something tangible for her thoughts to rebound off, but a wall will do as nicely as any flesh and blood. He may conduct himself as he pleases in these moments, except he may not sneeze or scuff his feet or fiddle with his gun, nor touch the books, nor rearrange the correspondence on the mantle. He is, with written notification, permitted to breathe.

He walks over to the bow-window so those few fortunates who chance an upward glance may enjoy his face.

"I mean, he's not a maniac as the public perceives that word. He's a maniac in the way your brother is a maniac. Not some gibbering asylum escapee battling his hallucinatory demons. He's completely normal, on the surface. He probably melts right into the background of Whitechapel after these murders. He's probably a little bit charming; he's approaching these women- there are no signs of struggle. He doesn't chase them down a dark alleyway, he comes to them as a client, he must put them at ease, to subdue them with such little effort. In a time when every client is suspect, when every _man_ who approaches these women is a potential mutilator, this man talks them away into a dark corner and is on them before it can even cross their mind that he could be the murderer. He's not poor. He's not struggling for survival. He has some time on his hands. Probably not a gentleman, one of those wouldn't last five seconds in some of those corners of Whitechapel, but lower middle class, maybe. Sexual murder is this…relatively new phenomenon to society." She gestures with her hands as she paces, not looking at him, but rather off into the distance where the gears of her mind catch on some distant dust speck and here are set smoothly into motion. "We used to spend all our time carving out our own little niche in society. You had to battle every day for your survival. You don't have the time to come up with these fantasies, let alone act on them. Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth Bathory- some of the earliest recorded killers who carried out their murders for the sheer pathological joy of it were aristocrats. They had the time, the money, the means. They didn't kill for profit, or revenge, or in self-defense, but because they enjoyed it. That's what this man is doing."

Baker Street puts out a few tendrils of mist as she continues to posit, tentatively, at first; the dogcarts and four wheelers and hansoms are still corporeal, the lamps do not flicker before those autumnal phantoms who raise their dead with unsettled murmurings from the graveyards, and send them at a lively stroll alongside the horses.

"Most of these murders have all taken place after the 19th century. I mean, you had the Sawney-Beane family in the 16th century. And Niklaus Stuller in 1577. And Peter Stubbe in 1589. But the Industrial Revolution- that's when it all really began to boom. That's when more than a privileged few suddenly didn't have to scrape and scrape and scrape every day just for a scrap of bread. So you had Fredrick Baker, a middle-class Englishman, he beheaded a girl, cut her into pieces and took her genitalia. And after him, Joseph Philippe, who also targeted prostitutes, six victims- a man called Gruyo in Spain, also six prostitutions, strangulation, just like our guy here. In 1870, there's a fourteen-year-old girl discovered in a field with her abdomen cut open, her intestines torn out, her genitals nearby. And then in 1871, a woman is strangled and left with her guts hanging out, and what do we know about the perpetrator?"

He rubs a clear spot on the window, where his breath has misted it over.

"22 years old, his name was Vincenzo Verzeni, who said he found 'unspeakable delight' in strangling women, and experienced erections while carrying out the murders. When he was just twelve he discovered the he could get sexual pleasure from wringing the necks of chickens. So this man. This man." She claps her hands beneath her nose once more, and back and forth she goes, back and forth, taking off her hat and tossing it onto the nearest chair. It lands neatly on the armrest.

She carefully circumnavigates the table and the chairs as she walks round and round, lest a stray bump nudge something from its rightful place, keeping up this long and ceaseless babble to herself, and from time to time forgoing the tapping of the fingers beneath the nose in favor of drumming them instead against her mouth.

"Enzo's here," he informs her, waving through the bow-window to the dark-haired man who sprouts suddenly from the mist, and, looking upward, salutes his amiable acknowledgement.

"Shh! No talking."

The bell sounds jauntily, and downstairs the door is whisked open and shut once more and then the heavy boots, finding the creak on the seventh step and with such an announcement not so much as stirring Caroline from her fevered hypothesis, clatter along the landing to their door.

He opens it before Enzo can knock.

"Hello gorge-" he begins, and then cuts himself off, catching sight of the rumpled hair, the knotted hands beneath the chin, all these telltale signs of impending Wrath should man in his clumsy ignorance disturb this breathless monologue. "Are we not talking?" he whispers.

"We're not talking."

They watch her round the table, avoid the chair, touch the mantel with one pale hand.

"Oh!" she calls out suddenly, smacking both hands together before her face, eyes glittering.

He raises an eyebrow.

Enzo stands looking at her with his usual amorous glow; explaining precisely nothing, Caroline hastily knots her hair at the nape of her neck and, rolling up her sleeves, says to him, "Ok; you can punch me now."

Tuesdays Enzo has a standing invitation for tea and boxing. Now with careful supervision are the chairs and the sofa allowed to be pushed aside to clear a space in the middle of the flat where the two can circle one another with their fists up. Caroline fished Enzo out of some benefit at Alison's rooms some two years past, and finding him a patient teacher, has ever since then spent one night a week adding to her repertoire of the violent arts. She hasn't the strength of Enzo, but with a cross-hit once helped a drunken groper in dispensing three of his more wretched teeth while her teacher watched with a smile to rival any proud father's, then assisted the man with the rest of his afterward much-improved face.

He watches them. You don't risk a face like this.

Mrs. Hudson will be in to sqauwk at them in some moments, though with none of the froth his target shooting inspires; 'mind the neighbors while you're tramping round like that!' she'll scold, and then drift away to that mysterious fairyland of Deus Ex Machina where plots appear and disappear at will. Perhaps a bear chases her from this humble stage and beyond into its darkened wings. He lost a brother there once.

For some time Caroline and Enzo sweat and slap at one another while Enzo calls out instructions and the bits of crowing praise which mean she has scored a hit of the disabling variety; it looks like rather nice foreplay, if you ask him. He wonders if that Tim chap likes to be knocked about a bit?

Mrs. Hudson lurks somewhere beyond, putting neither foot nor hair over the threshold as Enzo and Caroline continue to thrash one another. It's rather concerning. She is getting on somewhat in years, after all.

He fires his revolver twice into the back wall.

"Just checking, darling," he says when she comes thundering up the stairs to their door.

" _Kol_!" Caroline wails in the background.

* * *

She strews the Baker Street Irregulars across the East End after this 'Leather Apron' and sends Kol off to the music halls with Enzo as babysitter.

She pores over the inquests, she walks the murder sites once and twice and again; she tumbles every encyclopedia off her shelf and from the last century, two, three she dredges up all the worst acts of this long and fruitful race because he is just. A. Man. Somewhere he left something tangible. Somewhere there is a step, a print, a _hint_.

She does not think about a certain dimpled jerk who keeps up a long and steady stream of telegrams.

Obviously.

* * *

Though man may on the whole judge himself a noble and worthy race, each day his sitting room finds itself privy to a new and varied swarm of petitioners.

Are these the sediment of society, that musty stratum into which all our rubbish is thrown, do we not say to ourselves, looking out over these shabby coats, the sooty hats, the worn and suffering faces which privation has molded with his rough fingers- ah, yes, precisely as I expected?

But then, of course, you are struck by Mrs Abbot's hat. Quite fetching, bit of plume, fashionably tilted.

She would like her husband robbed, and afterward stabbed. Slowly, mind you; she emphasizes that quite strictly, does Mrs Abbot: slowly, dear, so he's time to feel it.

Rather pedestrian, in his opinion; might he offer you a special deal, today only, an 'accidental' decapitation, the artistry of which he is positive would not find itself humbled beside a Bernini?

Half off.

He dimples.

He sketches Caroline as he hears out the rest of these clamoring customers, smudging the coal dust with his fingers to lend the curls their proper luster, and in manipulating the lighting finding himself suddenly struck by the corner of her mouth, which is not so fresh as life, no, there is something wooden in it, something which does not suggest there lives in this humble flesh a breathless laugh, behind the teeth there is the sharp tongue, in these universal features gifted to man by either science or divinity, there is something which transcends the base functions of vulgar speech and animal passion-

"Guvnor?"

He looks up from his paper.

The man who has interrupted him is but a minor player in his organization, a bit of that coarse muscle which even the most gifted must occasionally employ, for the truly nasty work.

He's had one warning already about this sort of transgression.

He picks up the pistol on his table, holding his charcoal in the other hand, and shoots the man in the face.

Two liveried servants collect the man promptly and convey him through a side door.

"What have I said about shooting in the house, Niklaus?" Elijah asks, appearing in the entrance with a book in his hand, and that slightly ruffled brow which indicates true exasperation. "You're as bad as Kol."

"Dismissed," he tells the line before him, and shutting his notebook, whisks off his jacket, saying to one of the nearby help, "The Jack Grady outfit; thank you, mate."

Elijah watches in nauseated silence as he is promptly brought a pair of trousers which have long bid farewell to their prime, a jacket out at the elbows, and some brogans hard as a nut, which must be pounded rather than slipped onto the feet.

His brother attempts to alleviate the worst of this desecration, straightening the shoulders and dusting the trousers with his pocket square, but there is no mere cloth which can restore the threads, and return to these emblems of poverty their factory shine. "Off to pursue your investigation in Whitechapel, I assume?" Elijah asks, setting aside his book

"One can't leave everything to the minions, brother," he says with a wink, and, clapping Elijah heartily on the shoulder, goes off whistling into the hall.

* * *

In casting off his purple cloak, man divests himself not merely of his finery, but his title as well. Gone, the mincing. Gone, the gibbering salutations of the worker to his superior. Gone, that silence in which society kneels when this superior passes overhead, rendering his chatter inane. There is a whole language to which the aristocracy is not privy; feeling in himself the gilded limbs, the untainted blood, he recognizes so too must his views and his extrapolations emerge similarly Midas-blessed. And what has this underlayer to offer- muddied to his knees, with soot in his hair, illiterate, and having spent his last shilling on his beer, are his opinions to be weighted in the same scale, must we consider his views with equal consideration when he's no Dante in his heart, when he can barely speak English never mind Greek, when in his simple scrabble for just a few more years he has worn himself beyond his youth, when all the mechanisms of his intellect, like the unwound clock, have frozen with the hands mid-circuit- no.

And so Lord Breverton may take himself slumming, and risk his pocket watch in the long avenues of the ill-bred, but he may never know their hearts. So does the peasant rise up and seize his king by the throat as he sips his frosty lemonade.

He joins this sea of disheveled worker caps, and is absorbed. Out at the elbow, with his knees patched, his hair dirtied, his nails broken, he is merely one more little swell in this listless wave, which goes about on foot, and for a penny catches at the bridles of the gentlemen. He has transitioned from 'sir' to 'mate'. In crossing the thoroughfares, he must now dart rather than strut; in his dinner jacket he is a customer, in his rags a target.

But in descending through these circles, in coming, at last, to this final perdition, the mighty East End, which the newspapers sketch in hushed whispers, and in painting its factories and public houses employ the same dark brush, strewing in its wake every conceivable nightmare, he has opened before himself a world to which neither the gentleman nor the bobby is revealed. The gentlemen watches from his hansom as he might view _La Forêt enchantée_ through his binoculars, and in so putting between himself this layer, inoculates himself; he sees as in a mist, that pleasant bluntness of patrician distance: he notices neither the dancer's strain, nor her sweat; he sees not the worker's bleeding fingers.

And here the strange Babel of tongues which have never tasted foreign prints, but pass, instead, their own coarse version from mother to babe where you may find a rude beauty as in the crudest of any unloved pebble, found and kicked aside by the plows.

This the gentleman misses as he trots past with a vague welling of sympathy, straightening his cuff links.

However, in plunging into the center of it, in taking it up yourself, in feeling its strange texture on your tongue and suffering your nostrils' slow anosmia, you will find that countries do not turn on their politicians, they are not powered by the mighty, they are carried on the shoulders of these grim employees, who bear and are sometimes crushed beneath these burdens. Here, from the bottom, at the root, is where the first waters are drunk, then, and from there this nourishment finds its way to the crown, where burst all its jeweled rewards.

It is here you will find your intrepid murderer.

The sun sits steady at one o'clock; already ragged men and women are beginning to queue for the workhouses. For a man to seek his bed at seven sharp is too late; he must line up the afternoon before, properly destitute, with less than four pence in his pocket, with longer expression than his neighbor, and more holes in his trousers.

In the worst avenues, where the sludge is darkest, and the children leanest, men can be found scrounging in the gutters for wizened apple cores blackened to anonymous lumps by manure and boots; what his more fortunate companions have thrown aside he eats thirstily: the rinds, the pits, all those superfluous remains which with fortune in your pocket you have the privilege to bin and pass merrily on.

But in wandering farther you find these social reformers with their upraised arms and their shouts to outdo the rest have exaggerated; they have put before your eyes the horrors of every Dickensian wretch; they have painted over the cobblestones with sewage, filled the ditches with dead, erased the omnibuses, the tram cars, the railway stations: they have built in their stead a Hades, and at its gates no simple Cerberus, but those expiring creatures whose mothers have unlatched them from their breasts, and thrown them helpless into the streets.

Yet on your right you see the Aldgate Meat Market, and the butcher's hooks, the waggons which creak beneath their hides: now here you pass on, and come to the book stalls, and farther still the second-hand book shops, light, literacy: someone has torn the veil between earth and hell, they have shone that great lamp the sun into all the corners of Purgatory, and into its suffering hand put Voltaire.

He listens to everything around him, to the workers and middle class alike, to the man cracking plum pits between his teeth and the woman rifling Blair's Sermons. Somewhere between destitution and prosperity this man has slipped, playing at either one.

In such dress he may pop into any of the public houses and choose to quietly observe, or knock elbows with every tattered riff-raff.

Engage the bartender of any establishment and you will find in him riches an encyclopedia could not lay before you, but this man has no elaborations to make upon 'Leather Apron'. He is a shade; and all the whores have sketched him in different lights. He is simultaneously tall, stunted, fat, emaciated; blonde-haired, brown-haired, red-haired. There is a lameness to his right leg, his left; he is as fleet-footed as any pink youth.

He swings round to the various different hidey-holes which are scattered throughout Whitechapel to check his messages and quiz his various sentries, who have seen nothing.

Crimes are not committed in London without his knowledge; most of them must have his express permission.

This bit of flesh and blood, this insignificant, this _outsider_ who dares to lower his shoulder to the likes of himself-

He shuts his eyes.

Alone in the room of a shabby lodging house which is hardly larger than his thumbnail, and certainly smaller than Bekah's closet, he sits on the edge of Jack Grady's monastic bed with his fingers beneath his chin.

Next door the O'Connell brats are at it again; mother bellows from the bottom of her stout bosom; bloody murder is threatened no less than three times.

In the chronicles of history, crime, and in particular, murder, have many a commendable entry for your indignation (none so appallingly impressive as his own, though, he assures you). There was that de Rais chap, of course; our delectable Countess Bathory, Nicklaus Stuller, Peter Stubbe; a whole spotty array of sexual perversion which, toddling on its infant legs in those uncertain periods of pre-middle class toil, have now in the 19th begun to become, if not commonplace, certainly more widely remarked.

And along comes this lad, on the heels of The Monster, and Alton's Fredrick Baker, noteworthy specimens of England's especial depravity. You may put a stick up your backsides, mates, and hide your flogging in the brothels, but so too will your barbarity out.

He takes a notebook from beneath a loose floorboard, and skims its coded entries.

For nearly a week he has put up his ears and stretched out his many arms into all the side streets and back alleys of Whitechapel, and for his troubles, he has a clutch of rumors, whispers, those darting peripheral flashes of the spooked streetwalker.

'Jack Grady' has wandered from one end of Whitechapel to the other, and spotted only its usual offences. The usual soot has settled in his collar, and the familiar slag crept over his boot tops; in his hair nestle all the standard pollutions of industry and humanity.

Somewhere there is another man, of slightly higher standing, who has the freedom to develop his propensities, who strolls the district unnoticed, who is neither gentleman nor wretch, who makes his way on foot, by the streets, who has not soiled his trousers in the gutters, who perhaps has even an extra bit of bob for the omnibus, who slips by skill or luck these snares which he has laid, who sidles just out of Caroline's fingers, who treads these pavements soundlessly, sans humanity's usual bread trail.

He drums his fingers on the notebook, frowning.

Briskly, he makes another notation with the stub of pencil in his pocket, and snaps the cover shut.

Let's check in on our ravishing detective, then, shall we?

* * *

Sometimes you feel a tingling on the back of your neck, and for you that means to turn around, to squint into the darkness, to walk a little faster.

For her that means opening the door to her apartment and finding in her favorite chair his smirking face, staring back at her.

"How did you get in here?" she demands, shutting the door behind her. Kol is downstairs paying the hansom driver; there's this heaviness in the air, where there ought to be other lives insinuating themselves, but all down the hall is silence, a great snowed-in thing which presses in from the outside, and here in this hollow just the sound of his breathing. "I told Mrs. Hudson not to let you in."

"The landlady? She seemed quite charmed by me. I imagine I have somewhat more freedom to come and go than you would perhaps prefer." He pauses for a moment, waiting for her to contradict him.

She crosses her arms over her chest.

He likes to lick his lips before he says something. He can't just say it: there has to be a pause, there has to be a waiting, all the world must have bent their ear to his genius, and with bated breath grovel for his insight.

"How goes the investigation?" He lifts one eyebrow innocently.

She slips over to the window, not turning her back to him, and glances down onto the street to determine where Kol is at in his negotiations.

He's leaning on the cabbie box with his patented drop-your-drawers-it's-worth-it smile, which means there is at least a 70% chance he'll leave with the driver and drag himself in somewhere between Do You Know What Time It Is and noon. Freaking wonderful.

She spins around and clasps her hands behind her back. "That's my business, not yours."

"As we both know you've already tracked my day's activities down to the very street by my sleeves, I'll spare you the details and say instead what we're both thinking: rather slippery chap, isn't he?" He doesn't even blink, looking at her. He moves his eyebrows as he talks, and gestures with his hands, he employs all these various little flourishes meant to draw every last eye, but he doesn't look away from her.

You can feel him pulling stuff from the very bones of you.

"I have some theories," she says, a bit stung.

"I don't doubt it. But theories won't run this man to ground, no, not him; you need something more. You've spun some vague profile in your head, you've the outline of this man, but his minutiae- those you haven't sorted."

She can sense a proposal. His lips are knowing. His hands have tented beneath his nose and now his scrutiny narrows further, you could take off every modest layer, down to her last petticoat, and she wouldn't feel more naked.

Kol is still talking with the driver.

"You know," he says, casually, purposefully casually, so that you know he's spent the last three hours mulling it over in his head, but he can't be seen to think, he has to have everything at his fingertips, it must just come to him, he has to have already on his tongue all the retorts to every question of man, and all the schemes that ever were he has already countered, check and mate, just by sitting in this chair and stirring his pinkie finger this has all leaped to full and crystallized reality, he has made it Be.

And on the seventh day he created Light, yadda yadda.

"Sitting in one's flat in Baker Street isn't terribly conducive to the investigation of such a case as this, wouldn't you agree? This man slips in and out of Whitechapel at will while you sit here before your fire spinning hypotheses to impress my brother. Wouldn't it be more useful, say, to be right in the midst of it, hearing each fresh report as it leaves the lips of the prostitutes, walking, living, where this man has tread? You must know, of course, that he is either a resident of Whitechapel or has established a den in its midst."

"Of course."

"I have a flat in Whitechapel. Actually, I have several, one can never have too many-"

She cuts him off. "So do I. You can put your penis away; I'm not matching Evil Villain Lairs against one another. I'm pretty sure you'll win that one. And also, let me just see if I can 'hypothesize' what you're about to suggest, which is that you and I take an apartment in Whitechapel, together. Where I will be sleeping alone, with a mass murderer."

"With excellent table manners." He smiles.

"No."

He sighs; not like he's disappointed; as if he expected no better than this kind of nonsense from the peons. "Two extraordinary heads are better than one, wouldn't you agree, love?"

She doesn't correct the nickname; he'd enjoy that. "I've already got something up my sleeve that doesn't involve me probably being strangled in my sleep, thank you."

"Not an opponent such as yourself, sweetheart; I have more respect for your abilities than that. I'd strangle you whilst you were looking right at me; you'd have every chance at a proper retaliation, I assure you."

"That inspires a lot of confidence in sharing a room with you. Thank you, but I'm going to have to go with 'no'. A resounding no. And now you can see yourself out."

He does get up obediently enough.

She doesn't like the way he looks at her. Under his dirty cap he is somehow softer, more pitiable, closer to a man. He has two days of stubble on his face, and a bit of coal dust on his cheek.

And under his fingernails: still the charcoal, still the tracks of his art along his thumb and middle finger, some permanent part of him he has opened to her inspection and never stored away.

"Good evening, Caroline," he says softly, with some meaning in it she doesn't want to ponder.

She listens to him greet his brother on the stairs.

* * *

On the evening of the seventh she gathers all the boys, and lines them up in her living room.

"Can you guys be women?" she asks.

"I don't see why not," Enzo replies.

"Darling, do you really have to ask?" Kol drawls.

"Em," Tim contributes.

But her eyes are already roving down the line, down to this behemoth standing at its end, his hat sticking up nearly half a foot above the rest, lean, but with those dock laborer's muscles Kol keeps staring at, and the forearms she can hide beneath some sleeves, and the shoulders which she cannot. "I could use some stage tricks, maybe have you crouch a little when you walk, hunch your shoulders, but there's only so much I can do, it's not like we can just- throw a tent-y dress over all this," she sweeps her arm up and down to indicate Tim's whole body, "and suddenly you're a 5' 6", middle-aged prostitute anyone would love to stab-"

"Listen, gorgeous," Enzo interrupts. "You're going to need to elaborate a bit for those of us who aren't as quick on the uptake."

"Right." She claps her hands together and beams at them all. "I'm going to disguise myself as a prostitute and you're coming with me. At first I thought, we'll all be prostitutes, it's three times the bait of just lil' ol' me, but he's too tall."

"Sorry," Tim says.

"So! Here's what we do. We split into teams of doubles, two of us will be prostitutes, Tim and whichever of you don't come with me will be clients."

"I'll be a client," Kol volunteers instantly.

"The 'clients' will walk the streets I assign to them. Enzo and I will operate as bait in Spitalfields. Everyone stays within shouting distance of one another. We keep our eyes out for anything suspicious, anything strange, anybody who has that sort of shifty I-just-can't-wait-to-mutilate-a-prostitute look to them."

"Simple enough. I imagine most mutilators advertise that sort of thing," Kol says, staring at Tim's ass.

"Don't be sarcastic. And stop looking at his butt."

Tim turns bright red and starts to emit something which she supposes are to be taken as words, and she pauses, she turns a little toward him, she says, "Uh…I actually was talking to Kol, not you."

He snaps his mouth shut and turns even redder.

Kol looks so incredibly pleased with himself that she takes a moment from her instructions to roll her eyes, and then collecting herself, she strolls on, back and forth down the line, rattling off assignments, and in her head calculating all those changes of cheekbone and jaw line which must be transformed in Enzo, the stubble shaved, the chin softened, and around the eyes those hardships of the street which any middle-aged streetwalker bears with weary indignation.

She whisks Enzo away into her bedroom for his makeup.

She throws open the wardrobe to consult her color-coded wigs. "Is that Tim laughing?"

"He does that occasionally," Enzo replies, lounging back on her bed and from his pocket taking a packet of roasted peanuts. "And Kol could make the Thames talk to him, if he liked. And have sex with him, probably. That poor giant bastard doesn't have a chance." He rips open the packet, and rustles one big heap into his mouth.

"No crumbs on the bed!" she scolds, but absentmindedly, rifling the wigs, and in her mind matching the undertone of his skin to each synthetic strand, tilting her head this way and that, and to the sitting room and its muffled dialogue closing her ears. "Hmmm…I think…a dirty blonde."

"Whatever you say, gorgeous."

* * *

 _Already at eight o'clock London has begun its transformation; the lamps have not yet been lit, the sun, still drowsing over the Thames, has not yet ceded its ground: but here the intermission, when behind the curtain there drifts that mysterious shuffling of the scenery, undergoing its metamorphosis._

 _By day a man knows what he is about; perhaps the Devil may still touch him, but he leaps from unexpected corners, he takes the gentleman unawares, and leaves him dying in the sun._

 _Here he lurks in this miasma from which slithers every dark being who cannot weather the light, no matter how porous his belly._

 _By day London, and even the nefarious Whitechapel, in these contemporary times and then, in the autumn of 1888, laboring even under the fearsome reign of that invisible tyrant, frightened at the thought of letting its ladies loose into the streets, crystallized in this strange forewarning of battle, when Father Death has loosed his rime over the soldiers, was no vermicular carnival, secreting in its every back alley its tuppenny freaks._

 _But what nightmares the sun melts the moon once more snows down onto the unassuming masses; there is in every alley some unfathomable horror; where merely two hours before we tread lightly, we now circumvent; the gas lamps throw behind us that elusive evil, the shadow, which at high noon escorts and at midnight pursues._

 _Now the beggars, having feasted all day on the scraps of their hope, and come wailing to the very end of it, leap with outstretched hands toward those with even the shabbiest of overcoats. He who has any overcoat is a God; hurled, perhaps, from Olympus' mighty peak, and with Jupiter's wrath at his heels, but if somewhat dinged there is nevertheless an aureole round his head._

 _The prostitutes are after their first shillings: to the pubs these initial pennies, to their beds the final, which are gathered with the morning frosts, when the city has once more cracked its slumbering eye._

 _September 7 is pleasantly mild; a lady might be tempted to strip off that eternal divider of class, the glove. Whitechapel hovers still between its daytime façade and that which the more sensationalist articles have awarded it. Here shabby middle-class meets underworld ooze: there at the edge of the pavement you may see them commingling, tentatively at first, while the sun has not forgotten its long and prosperous reign._

 _But the poor are of notice only to themselves; once can be appalled only so many times. You have seen already the men eating apples from the gutters; you have mourned and moved on. Man was not meant to bear the griefs of his brothers; it upsets his stomach. And have we not thrown our taxes at it, have we not made our brief rumblings at Parliament, and subsided back into our tea? In penetrating into the wretch's lair, we see not him, but rather his pestilent milieu, the rotten shoring-beams which support his house, and the rags which clothe his limbs, we the privileged are left, not with the stamp of his dark and beleaguered soul on our hearts, but the visceral stench of his underarms, and the lice which teem in merry boiling upon his homey head. Is it the illiterate's Cockney mumblings which sell editions, do we rustle open the latest Star to see him masticate our grammar, and tug with dirty fingers at our freshly-polished heartstrings? No._

 _Rather it is the silver-penned Dickenses of the world who with metaphors aloft smooth the raw edges of this malodourous sewer where London has washed all its worst sins._

 _So too has the reader come to experience London's most desolate, but from the comfort of his bed, and in company of a gilt tongue._

 _I may oblige; in writing truly, we must cast aside all modesties, be they false or factual. The heart must be the inkwell, and the intellect its conduit. If I may be of any assistance to Him, it is in molding a narrative which is somehow worthy of His exploits, though few are those living who can with mortal pen and parchment hope to convey the astonishing machinations of Fate which he turns as deftly as any simple miller's wheel._

 _But it is not to Him I now guide you; we are bound for other plots. His movements at this hour of September 7th are vital, of course, but not yet for lesser eyes._

 _Contemporary readers will appreciate the significance of this date, but on that evening itself, Whitechapel, having flinched from its nape the prickling of this unseen murderer, and going about in the presence of an increased police force felt, if not safe, at least returned to its usual course of business. Hunger and Pestilence having reared their heads once more as the East End's most resilient threats, the inhabitants have now gone cheerfully back to their garroting. Down any number of alleys you may see the more well-dressed of the pedestrians set upon by gangs of broad-shouldered men, who employ their choke-holds swiftly and skillfully, and, having deprived their victim of his pockets, now gallop off to future heists._

 _In these early hours, the shopkeepers and their children are still about, and in that middle-class opulence bloom amongst their more ragged neighbours. The most garish of the ladies chat loudly as they make their way amongst the crowds, eyeing those men who stand out as their likeliest marks. The shadows which will later manifest in their mysterious depths every evil known and unknown to man have yet to materialize; your pocket being in dire peril, your throat is probably yet untouchable._

 _Among these unfortunate women, there is one, though her dress be plainer, and her cheeks spotted with pox, who stands above the rest: mere plaster, regardless of its seamless application, cannot conceal her. The hair she has left untouched, down around her shoulders: a man will overlook any number of pox scars for curls like those._

 _Caroline Forbes, in company of a stout woman some inches taller than her, moves off into Spitalfields, taking with her any number of interested looks: in her there is a vitality which neither pox nor rag can dim._

 _She is alert to everything; one can see (if one knows how to look), the slight pressure which thought has pressed upon the brow; hardly does she wrinkle her forehead, and yet there is beneath it a whole storm of observations, each vying with the other, and cancelling themselves out, those with more weight ousting their less significant forefathers, and taking their spots in those lists which she transposes over every man, woman, and child, and which reveal their every tic. To view the world through her eyes is to trace a man to the very lodging house from which he has sprung, and the last pub at which he has watered._

 _In all his centuries, God has crafted only one brain to equal hers: and society clamors that he has wasted it, putting it into a woman._

 _Society, being run by any number of dull-witted men, with jowls far more expansive than their intellects, bristles at any suggestion of feminine superiority. Dare the interloper challenge his long-established supremacy? He has built this girth as any noble with a right to his cigar: in those gentleman's clubs which assure him here on his throne, where he sits above the mud, above the smog, where he is entirely out of touch with every stratum of society which has not climbed over the heads of its dying to the uppermost tier, he knows this city to its struts, he comprehends every political gradation, and has with this interminable Right which God has granted to him in reward for his bloodline's long and incestuous service the ability to judge every last and lowest worm._

 _Two men, one of which you have earlier encountered during that Birlstone business, stop to talk to Caroline and her companion. The other will have no small part in the narrative of Kol Mikaelson at a later date, but on this night, he is still nearly a stranger: I will not linger on him. A common dock worker, hardly of any significance, but for his sticky fingers where brothers are concerned, born to common parents, in some middling Irish district. It is one of the great pities of our always unjust world that He could not imbue Kol with His own faultless taste. He always was consorting with lessers, poor Kol._

 _The gas lamps are now being lighted; one by one they pop on as the Thames proceeds with its nightly drowning of the sun._

 _When those rays are snuffed, so commences our second act._

 _You see the more well-dressed pedestrians begin to disappear. Each long hour is followed by one longer still; here winter with ambitious foresight sows her deadly frosts._

 _Our two groups have separated; the men wander off toward distant side alleys, Caroline and the unknown woman pursue the broader main streets. The entrances to many of these alleyways are no wider than a door, and in some places, the man to whom we will not give a name, being of the side character class for which readers do not care, is obliged to turn sideways, to fit his shoulders into the passage. Kol fares little better. In following their maneuvers (and drowning out their idle chatter), you see how our elusive murderer moves among the constables, missing and sidestepping them with nary a whispered suspicion._

 _Somewhere remote clocks chime their masters away to bed, and children are put yawning into their cradles._

 _Crass midnight has passed, when the whores still bellow after their drunken clients, and rustle their yet unwilted feathers: all these merry expulsions of the pubs, which shove their drunkards out with their rubbish, have at this hour long faded away. Arise ye, vile gutter beasts: the gong has struck your hour._

 _Where, you may demand, is He at this historic moment?_

 _All in good time, fair reader._

 _One mustn't muss their entrance by making it too early, hmm?_

* * *

Tim talks rarely, but he finds there are some topics which immediately prod him to long and blistering commentary. These are, in the following order of importance: Ireland, Dickens, and people who litter.

One does wonder how he walks these cluttered alleys and still has pearls remaining to clutch.

Caroline and Enzo (whom it must be noted he would not now fuck with Nik's cock) have melted off somewhere to the left. The fog, being imbued with that human necessity for drama (perhaps Nik has had it piped in from somewhere), builds a solid wall between them and the various branching side streets which Caroline has ordered them to watch minutely. At this hour, only Spitalfield's most desperate are still stumbling along in the cold.

Tim smokes with the collar of his coat turned up, trailing a long cloud after him. In the damp they press their shoulders against one another; he quite by chance (he's absolutely uncertain how he's made such a slip) feels up Tim's bicep. If inquiring minds would like to know, it's very firm.

"'Great Expectations' was a whole lot of dreary rubbish," he says, just to listen to Tim talk. He has a nice voice; soft, and with all the 'ths' sanded out of his accent. A voice which might lull you to long and peaceful sleep, or politely inquire after a spanking.

The gas lamps do not reach into some of the corners they pass, and for a moment the eyes insist there is in each of these corners all manner of apparitions: when you've the sand of an entire twenty-four hours blunting the peripheral vision, and muddying each blink, you notice every lost spirit which hunger (and yourself; let's not waste our time with modesties, darlings) has sent in dry whisperings along the streets. It's nearly a sound of leaves or rubbish, crawling about under the mist: but not quite.

"And do you really think he's out here?" Tim asks, putting out his cigarette. "Perhaps he's done?"

"Are you spooked?" he replies, bumping Tim's shoulder a little, and smiling up at him.

"No. A little," he admits, and laughs. "But mostly the wind's after freezing the bollocks off me."

"I could warm them up if you like," he offers, and Tim turns red all the way to the tips of his ears.

It isn't a 'no'.

For some moments they walk on in silence; not an entirely uncomfortable one. Somewhere is a distant burst of laughter. From Tim there is the rapid click click clicking of the pocket watch which occupies his long-fingered hands (he must have an excellent grip), and the steady mist blossoming at each fresh breath.

"Why'd you come to London?"

"Hmm?" Tim asks, rousing himself from some distant musing, and looking down at him from an angle, so the long lashes stand out against his pale cheek.

"From a small Irish town to an English metropolis? Isn't there some story there?"

"Chasing work," he says. And then: "Me mother died." He says it as if it's something fresh, something he hasn't yet patched over: but then perhaps men like this never quite patch anything over. They have not yet learned to put away their wounds, and snap at every kind hand.

"And then Caroline found you."

"And then Caroline found me. Down at the docks. She was dressed like a sailor; all blond wisp and scream. She says to me, you're tall: I like people who can reach things. Would you like a job?" Tim laughs; he's rather concerned by how much he likes it. He'll need to watch that round Nik.

"And so then you-" he begins, but suddenly Tim grabs his arm. Yes, darling- and now throw him into the wall; but in a moment he sees what's distracted Tim's attention. Some yards away, at the junction to another alley, a man has just approached a woman, one of the downfallen which are the only sorts of women Whitechapel sees at this hour; scrounging for her last few pennies, no doubt.

They quicken their pace a bit; Tim has not let go of his arm.

From this distance, nothing is discernible of their conversation; it could be any number of salacious transactions. "We'll just have a nice casual stroll past. If he takes her down the alley, we'll step down after them. They'll think we're only after a private spot for ourselves," he tells Tim.

"Have you a gun?" Tim asks.

"Three, actually."

" _Three_?"

"You just never know, darling. Also, it's integral to carry multiple calibers. Do you need a large hole that's going to stop them immediately, or something small for them to suffer over?"

Tim opens his coat to reveal two pistols, one rigged to either side of his ribcage, so that each hangs down just beneath his armpit. "I've another in me boot."

They look at one another for a moment.

He may be in love.

And then the man reaches out to seize the woman by her hair, and yanks her back into the alley.

* * *

Somehow she's separated from Enzo.

In the fog her senses are momentarily confused.

But here, breathe, breathe: you hear all that silence for miles down the streets and into the far-away harbor with its lowing tower. Two men have passed recently through this side street, one half a foot taller than his companion, and with a lame right foot. He ate three crusts of bread, and wiped his fingers twice on the wall.

She breathes.

She breathes.

There are no distant footsteps behind her, dogging her into the fog where, plunging into its midst, she is suddenly marooned.

The fog horn has gone.

Into all the near and distant corridors she hears this emptiness; an inexplicable sound, which neither poet nor reason can touch. We can chase absence through all the verse that ever stood against it, and never comprehend its reach.

She walks a little faster.

The shawl itches against her neck; she can feel her hands sweating where she clutches the edges of it.

She turns a corner.

Her own footsteps trip one by hollow trap after her, and she thinks: no.

No.

Not her own feet.

There is an irregular pattern to them, in the brief spaces between her own heels clicking against the cobblestones there is a softer sound, more muted, these are not pointed soles, but something flatter, with a nick in the left heel, these are footsteps which slightly favor the left side, the dominant side, the stride indicates medium height, each touches the ground with just enough force to suggest a slender frame, not slight- not a man who labors for his earnings, not an invalid: something squarely in-between.

She turns again.

She can taste her heart in her throat.

One more corner, to where she can put a wall at her back, and wait with cane in hand, slowing her breathing just as Enzo taught her, in through the nose, out, out-

And a man springs up suddenly from the shadows.

* * *

He has to lengthen his stride rather dramatically to keep up with Tim as they sprint down the street.

The woman has muddled her attacker's plan by shrieking continuously and slapping at him with both hands; he has lost hold of her momentarily, and she runs back into the main street, still wailing.

He sees them both charging full-tilt at him, and leaving the woman, now turns to flee into the alley. There's nothing distinguishable about him from here. Dark-haired chap, with a cap pulled over his eyes, and in a long coat; whether or not he's the proper shiftiness he couldn't tell you; having consorted with a fair number of shifty characters in his twenty-three years, they've all blurred together a bit for him.

Tim grabs the woman by the elbows, a controlled sort of crash, during which she is spun to the side as Tim asks, "You ok, ma'am?" and then left convulsively weeping on the pavement, with Tim's coat tossed hastily round her shoulders.

They swerve into the alley.

"Well, don't shoot him," Tim says when he takes out his gun. "If you've killed him before Caroline's the chance to talk to him, she'll shoot you right back."

"I was only going to kneecap him." There's always someone who has to ruin it for everyone.

He puts his gun away.

Caroline aims quite low.

The man's collar is snagged by Tim, who jerks him backward, half off his feet; "Don't struggle, or you'll get it," Tim informs him breathlessly, and by way of response, the man stabs him in the right side.

* * *

She darts her hand out for his throat, and he grabs her by the wrist.

* * *

"You fecking cunt," Tim says, almost politely, hardly even raising his voice, and slams the man's head into the wall.

Another thorough smacking of his face against the brick and he looses the knife; he slides down between them to lie crying in the mud. "You've killed me! You've killed me, you bloody bastard!"

"Listen, darling," he says, kneeling beside the man. "Quick question, and then we'll be on our way. You weren't dragging that woman off to murder and mutilate her, were you? Now, please think carefully about how you answer my question. It irritates me when people lie to me, because then I have to bring back false information to Caroline, and then she's angry, and I don't have to tell you what that's like to live with. I won't be able to move the furniture for weeks. I mean, you can, of course, but then there's mandatory lectures to attend, and she won't let you sleep in past six o'clock, and every time you try to bring home cocaine, she finds it instantly and disposes of it before you're quite out of your hangover."

Tim has squatted down on his heels on the other side of the man; he's not overly fussed with his wound, which means he's only a scratch then, and no one need have all their teeth pulled out. "Jaysus, you can run on."

"You should see what else I can do with my tongue."

He doesn't turn quite as pink this time; apparently physical assault brings out the flirt in him. He likes that in a man. Probably he doesn't mind a little aggressive choking; he'll ask Caroline later. Surely she conducts a thorough background check of all her employees.

"Obviously you don't run with decent people, so I assume the name Mikaelson means something to you? Particularly Kol Mikaelson? Nik likes to take all the credit, but I think most of us are well aware who's the handsomest and least sane of them all."

Excellent, darling; he notes by your pallor you are in fact well-versed in his exploits. He does worry about Nik eclipsing him; his brother's head is a bit bloated, tends to block out most of London and throw over his own considerable crimes a long and infuriating shadow.

"Please don't hurt me," the man pleads.

He looks up at Tim, licking his lips. "You're a little turned on, aren't you? I know I am. Say it again, darling. You don't want me to do what I've done to so many before you, do you? No? You've got to ask nicely, then. You've already stabbed one of us; that's not starting off on a very mannerly foot."

* * *

" _Klaus_?" she says.

He tilts his head a little. "By the throat, sweetheart, really? You don't think that's a bit risky, against a larger opponent?"

"The throat's an easy target: it's soft, easily reachable; it takes just a little pressure to cut off the airflow, and requires hardly any grip strength. The first instinct is panic when you can't breathe; the second is to breathe. So then while they're distracted trying to accomplish the second, you hit them really hard in the face with this." She holds up her cane. "Which I'm about to do in half a second if you don't explain to me why you're freaking creeping after me at four o'clock in the morning in an area being stalked by a freaky sex torture murderer who I'm still, by the way, not entirely sure isn't you."

He lifts one eyebrow innocently. "Just out for an evening stroll."

"So you're stalking me."

"Let's not call it that; bit ugly, wouldn't you say, love? Let's say instead, admiring from afar, shall we? Perhaps I'm studying your methodology so that I might easier dodge it in future? I am the most brilliant criminal of every generation, after all. A true Napoleon of crime, you might say, although he was a bit overrated, if you ask me, and I think neither of us would dare to insult the intelligence of the other by suggesting the same of me."

Oh woooow this man. This man. She speaks three languages and by means of Kol, who speaks nine, has expanded her vocabulary of the ego-mangling variety to a tidy twelve, and in none of them does there exist the means by which to express how completely _infuriating_ he is.

And another thing.

She hates his face.

She hates every last freaking _corner_ of it from the dimple on the left, slightly deeper, all the way to the curl that falls in lazy acquiescence to his Evil But With Style casual Satan chic, and if he thinks for one freaking moment-

"I've found something I think you might want to take a look at," he tells her, and then from the roof above them, Enzo comes sailing down, straight onto Klaus' head.

* * *

"He's me ex-husband," the woman with Tim's coat still round her shoulders says, puffing along the alley after them, having now thrown off her shock and pinched some of the colour back into her cheeks. "He's me ex-husband. He's only after a bit of bob is all, the git."

"Well, this is awkward," he says. "Sorry about those fingernails, darling; they do grow back. The rib you'll probably need to see a doctor about."

* * *

Mr. Evil Overlord, Ruler of Hell, Hades, and Niflheim, nearly faceplants.

Enzo saves him from this indignity by punching him into the wall.

She gets one quick glimpse of Klaus' face, absolutely white, and then they're all over each other, shoving, hitting, brawling right out into the street, where the fog alternatively swallows and regurgitates them once more.

For a moment she thinks Enzo has the upper hand. They're almost the same height, but Enzo is broader, more imposing, he has a right hook like nothing she's ever seen; it once brought down a 6' 6" Russian and his shotgun, and surely can handle one 5' 10" aristocrat.

But she remembers the incandescent rage, and how he threw her down in that chair like he could pick her up over his head, and throw her for eons and eons, and hardly ripple his shoulder muscles.

She puts herself between them.

"Stop. _Stop_ ," she says, and is by someone unseen thrown right back out of their fight, stumbling against the building to her right.

She lifts her cane and wades back in.

"I. Said. _Stop_ ," she demands, lashing out left and right with it, here striking a hand, there a leg, flailing about in this thick white curtain where limbs are brandished and suddenly withdrawn as if disembodied, and all the while they are still _punching each other_ , right out of her reach and into a clear patch, where she suddenly sees Klaus, his face completely contorted by rage, seize Enzo by the throat.

He presses down until Enzo is on his knees, and she thinks for just a second, oh God, oh God, here it is.

She lays her hand on his chest.

"Don't. Touch. Him," she says, and it stops him. Probably not many things can.

But for a second he looks from her to Enzo and back again, all the gears in his mind turning over, clicking back from cave to civilization, and for this one moment he deliberates, cocking his head as any cat over its mouse, and determining whether to consume or let loose.

And then he lets go.

Enzo spits blood at his feet, smirking up through a cut in his lip.

"He's not a murderer. Well, not the one we're looking for. Probably. Anyway, he's not here to murder me."

"I sorted that about ten seconds in, gorgeous. He's just got a very punchable face." It's disconcerting hearing his real voice from the painted lips.

"Who is this?" Klaus snarls.

Enzo smiles up at him. She doesn't like that smile; it means he could not be any less concerned with a man's societal standing or present state of armament. "Lorenzo St. John at your service, mate."

Some understanding washes over Klaus' face. She hasn't dropped her hand from his chest; she can feel how the muscles shift under it (there are most definitely not a noticeable lot of them), and so she brings around the walking stick within aiming range once more, in case he decides to lunge. "Do you two know each other?"

"We served in the army together, back in our youth. Not for very long; I believe we only had a year together, but what a year it was, yeah?"

Klaus' nostrils flare. "This is who you choose to associate with, sweetheart? Might I suggest dragging the gutters round Bethnal-green for something far worthier?"

She cops one of the sighs Kol uses when she has just confiscated his drugs, or told him he can't have sex in her bed. "Ok. So. Back to why you were creeping after me in that alleyway? What do you have to show me?"

He holds his staring contest with Enzo for one more prolonged moment; she gets two good revolutions out of her eye roll before he can be bothered to stop impressing upon everyone the magnitude of his squintiest glower.

"Another woman's been murdered," he says at last, and she drops her hand.

* * *

At the bottom and to the left of the stairs which lead into the yard of 29 Hanover Street, parallel to the fence bisecting Nos. 29 and 27, there is a woman's body.

Two feet from the back wall of the house, and eight inches from the steps.

She is lying on her back, legs pulled up, and her skirts tossed over the knees: left arm on the left breast, the right stretched along the right side.

Enzo has been sent to find Kol and Tim, leaving just her and Klaus alone in this yard which dawn has not yet touched, and the gas lights grope after but cannot access. There is such a stillness here: in every 4 a.m. nook, there is some fleeting life, where mortality if widespread is at least not omniscient.

But what she hears in the lodging, in the adjoining yard, in the streets, the harbors, the thoroughfares- just the calm and even breathing beside her. She wants to touch him. Not because he deserves it, not because she's frightened, she needs a man, in her frail and womanly arms there is not the strength to bolster herself- no.

You just…want to remember: there are people, and they have such warmth in them.

She looks at the woman's face first, because you can do that for them: you can put aside your reason, just for a moment, just to acknowledge, they once were a daughter, and they had love around them.

And then she says, "Ok. Did you see anything?"

"'Fraid not. I cut through the yard and stumbled across her like this, perhaps fifteen minutes ago." He points back toward where he entered the yard.

The woman's throat has been cut, left and back, not cleanly, but with frayed skin bristling all around the wound. Small intestines and flap of the abdomen on the right side, above her shoulder; these are attached by a cord to the remaining intestines, which snake somewhere into the remainder of her abdominal cavity. Two flaps of skin, from the lower part of the abdomen, lying in a great puddle of blood above the left shoulder.

"Her throat was cut while she was already lying down. If she were standing, it would have gone down the front of her dress, but it's here, on the left, above her shoulder, where he started." She drums her fingers against her chin. He can squat here, all preternatural lurk and loom; she needs to pace, back and forth beside the woman, turning one way and then the other, triangulating the yard in her head, and from every possible entryway sketching out this woman's final journey. "She came from the direction of Commercial Street; the man was behind her. This is a high traffic area- lodging houses to either side, Spitalfields Market just down the road. There'll be lodgers, workers, probably other prostitutes coming in and out- but either he felt safe, or he didn't know he might be inadvertently stumbled across by any number of foot traffic. But of course, he's slipped through my hands, he's slipped through yours- he didn't just happen across this spot, he knew it would be a peaceful place to carry out his work. What time is it?" she asks, not looking at him but pointing one hand severely, and she hears him take a watch from his pocket, snap it open, click it shut once more. "4:20."

"She must have been killed recently, but Kol will confirm that. You couldn't have brought her here at midnight- there would have still been people moving in and out, the pubs are just closing- no that would have been a terrible time. But 4:00: nobody's up for work yet, he's right in that window between all the drunks finally bedding down, and the people who are just getting up for the morning shifts." She kneels down next to the woman, and touches her left hand very lightly, barely disturbing it from the breast where it's been tossed. And then back up, with her glass in hand, over to the back wall of the house, near the woman's head, where some eighteen inches from the ground are six spots of blood, from the width of a six-penny piece to that of a pin head. Fourteen inches from the ground, there are spots of clotted blood on the wooden palings, immediately above the puddle over her left shoulder.

At her feet, nearly invisible in the darkness, is a piece of muslin, in which have been wrapped a small-tooth comb and a pocket comb inside a paper case.

"Well, that hardly looks accidental, now does it?" Klaus says, delicately unfolding the piece of muslin in his long fingers to reveal the combs laid neatly side by side. "Hardly something that tumbled out of her pocket by violence."

"Yes," she says, and now kneels down beside him. "He placed them there like that."

From the fog the boys emerge piece by piece: first the clattering heels, which the cobblestones announce with hollow bay, and then the jumbled accents, the two Englishman clamoring over the top of one another and that underlayer of soft Kerry burr.

When they walk into the yard, Kol is beside Tim, close enough that his elbow, winged out from where he's stuck his hand in his pocket, touches Tim's.

He moves away the moment he spots Klaus next to her.

"Kol," she says, and it's the only thing that needs to pass between them; he sweeps off his coat, hands it over to Enzo, and rolls up his sleeves.

"I see your university education hasn't entirely gone to waste, brother. Elijah may comfort himself with that, at least."

"He ought not to make himself too comfortable; I'm still a drunken philistine," Kol assures his brother, kneeling over the woman, first at her head, which he lifts very carefully with two fingers, turning the chin so he can view her neck wound from every angle.

Tim, catching sight of the bottom half of her as he and Enzo pick their way through the dark yard, the former managing his skirts a little awkwardly, turns to the side, and throws up explosively.

"Good job I got my shoes clear of that; Elijah would take back every nice observation he'll make once you relay to him Kol Mikaelson: Medical Examiner Extraordinaire." He fishes his pocket square one-handed out of his vest, and tosses it to Tim.

And then there follows a precise catalog of everything he finds, which she listens to with closed eyes, and the tips of her fingers against her chin. "There are only a few bloodstains, just on her jacket, round the neck, inside and out, and a few on her left arm. A bit on the back of her skirt, on the outside; she must have lain in it. Bodices stained round the neck, hardly anything on the petticoats. Nothing on the stockings. Swelling of her face and the tongue suggest she was probably smothered a bit before he slit her throat. Bruise on the right temple and two bruises the size of a man's thumb on the fore part of the top of her chest. I don't think they're recent, though. However, she's got some scratches on her face and round the sides of her jaw that are fresh. Three scratches just below the lobe of the ear, running in opposite directions to the incisions. Two fresh bruises on the right side of the head and neck, one on the cheek, and the other corresponding with the scratches on her left side. He must have grabbed her by the chin prior to cutting her neck. Ring missing from her ring finger, roughly taken. She's been cut so it looks as if he tried to take off her head, and wasn't able."

"And the abdominal mutilations?" she asks, opening her eyes as he works his way down the body, coming now to huddle on his heels in front of the woman's spread knees, as though assisting a birth.

"Inflicted after death. Someone knew a little something at least about what he was doing. Abdomen's completely open; intestines severed from their mesenteric attachments and lifted out of the body, then placed by the shoulder of the corpse. The uterus and its appendages, along with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder, have been removed."

"Removed?" she repeats.

Tim begins to make alarming noises once again.

Enzo pats him on the back.

"Yes, and the incisions were neatly cut; whoever's done it avoided the rectum, and divided the vagina low enough to avoid injuring the cervix uteri. He has at least enough anatomical knowledge to have not made a complete mess of it. Part of the stomach wall's missing as well, and the navel. He did everything with the same knife, I'd say. Something very sharp, thin, narrow, somewhere round six to eight inches in length. Not a bayonet or anything a cobbler would use. Possibly a slaughter man's knife might have done it."

"Thanks," she says, rising. "Easier than sneaking into the mortuary and stealing the medical examiner's report like last time, anyway. Maybe if Lestrade weren't so freaking stingy with his information-"

"There, there, gorgeous," Enzo tells her. "Anyway, between me and Kol, you've a whole army of sticky fingers at your disposal. Our theft is at your service." He winks.

Klaus tries to stare him to death.

"Ok, everyone; spread out. I want you to go over every inch of this yard. If you find anything, don't touch it- tell me immediately. Tim, take the left side. Kol, the right. Enzo, you're going to canvass all the ground in between. Klaus." She snaps her fingers. "Right here, because I don't trust you, so you can look exactly where I look, following me along like a murdery shadow."

In addition to the muslin cloth and the combs, there is a piece of envelope near the woman's head, which holds two pills. On the back: a seal and 'Sussex Regiment' in blue embossing. On the other side: a handwritten 'M', and lower, 'Sp'. There's no postage stamp, only a red postmark which reads: 'London, Aug. 23, 1888.' She slips it into her bodice.

"Isn't that stealing evidence, love?" he asks, and tsks, but with this smile on his face, like some kind of camaraderie has suddenly passed between them, one criminal to another, he is just so happy, beaming here in the moonlight, like this one little sin has irrevocably bound them.

"Boys?" she calls out, turning away from him.

"Just an empty nail box," Enzo calls back.

And from Tim: "A piece of flat steel."

But Kol, crouching at the far end of the yard, lifts one finger and beckons her forward, toward the water tap which is only dimly outlined in the moon that occasionally crests the foam of this murky night, and breasting one cloud, momentarily dares a long stripe or two over the yard before plunging under once more.

At his feet, soaked through, is a leather apron.

It's been thoroughly scrubbed, she finds as she goes over it with the glass, but in the far left corner, on the underside, where it might have brushed against whoever cleaned and then crumpled it here after rinsing it down, is a strand or two of some unknown fiber.

She unrolls her leather tool kit, and taking up a pair of tweezers, carefully, carefully prizes it up from the leather, and drops it into one of her phials.

"Enzo: it's time to go and find a constable."

Back into her skirt pockets go the kit, the tweezers, the phial.

Tim, she finds on turning around, is kneeling beside the woman, completely white, in one of his hands his rosary, his prayer yet unuttered.

His hands are shaking.

"Couldn't we pull the skirt down, give her some little bit of dignity?" he asks, hopefully, and she feels this little pang, and she kneels down across from him, because some things you have to deliver on an equal level, you can't just loom over them, raining proclamations from above, you have to touch a wrist, a cheek, something they can feel in some small and lingering way.

"We have to leave her like we found her so the police can examine her," she says, gently.

Klaus, contrary to her orders, has wandered away toward the edge of the yard, and stands listening into the night along the boulevards, his head cocked.

She whispers over to Kol, "Take him out of the yard for some air," and, handing Tim off, goes to wait beside Klaus.

* * *

Quite a fuss is raised over the latest murder; Caroline spends some time bustling back and forth between Scotland Yard, leaving him and the flat to his own devices (always interesting; never wise). For a good three days, he shakes the frost out of Mrs. Hudson's bones with a series of reports that send her thundering up the stairs to rattle at their door: "You knock off with that revolver, Kol Forbes!" she shouts, and being appeased by his meek and regretful silence, is allowed to reach the third stair before he begins plugging away once more.

On the fourth he returns from an excruciating afternoon tea (Elijah forced him to attend, which he was made to regret: it ought to have ousted the latest victim from tomorrow's premiere pages; you may read about it then) to find her bent over the work table, frowning into her microscope.

"Hello, darling," he says, and unwinding his scarf, leans over to kiss her cheek. He rests his chin on her head. "And what are we doing?"

"Isolating coal-tar derivatives. I need to just sort of relax and turn everything over in my mind."

"Ah, yes, just lazing about, isolating coal-tar derivatives. As one does."

"Well, the Germans are pulling ahead in the synthetic dyes race, and they get really braggy when they outpace us on industrial advances. Do you want that?" She makes some mysterious adjustments.

"It's my greatest fear," he assures her, and kisses the side of her head once more before retiring to his chair, with his feet up on the dining room table, which she notices with her back turned, and both eyes intent upon her experiments. Flapping one hand at him, and making some noises in the back of her throat which he has learned to translate from gibberish to reprimands, she turns at last in her chair.

He takes off his boots, and puts his stockinged feet once more on the table, with his best Nik smile.

She sighs.

But then a thoughtful wave comes over her face, you see it change in a moment, and, getting at her bottom lip with her little teeth, she says to him, "I've analyzed the fibers on the apron we found beside Annie Chapman. They're consistent with the cloth used in police uniforms."

He removes his feet from the table, and leans forward. "So a constable's gone off his head, and, finding it too difficult to arrest them, has instead resorted to killing them?"

A little wrinkle appears between her brows, which in Caroline precedes some revelation or another, behind which the gears are ever whirring, and from one theory to another carrying her in the blink of a mortal man's eye. "I don't think so. I think…it might have been planted."

"Then why go to the trouble of washing the apron? Or perhaps it's unrelated to the murders?"

"No; it's related. It's too big of a coincidence that at the scene of a murder, a series in a string of which are being pinned on some mysterious 'Leather Apron' wandering around Whitechapel harassing prostitutes, a leather apron, completely unconnected to the case, suddenly appears. It was placed there purposefully. And if he's clever enough to evade me, to evade your brother- who, by the way, is freaking incensed that some wannabe is swaggering around the East End killing people without his permission- he's clever enough to have removed all traces of himself. So why wash it down and leave just that little bit of evidence where it can be found by investigators? He left it to be found. It doesn't point to a constable. But it does perhaps point to someone with casual access to one- otherwise how else do you get the fibers?" She spins back round in her chair. "So you see why the coal-tar derivatives."

He holds his hands out to either side. "I always turn to them in my time of need."

Caroline having flung herself headlong once more into her dyes, he takes his feet from the table, and turning to retreat to his bedroom, where he's a book and needle awaiting him, crosses the room, shedding his coat on the way, and tossing it carelessly over the couch; something for her to moan about later, when she's the concentration to spare for his domestic habits.

"Oh," she says, in a terribly casual voice, quite suspicious, the hair on him bristles instantly, "something sort of funny I just so happened to notice: I thought you hated Dickens?"

"Yes, Great Expectations could drive a less handsome man to shoot himself in the face. I wouldn't, of course. My bone structure, you know."

She turns to him with such an angelic glow he checks the pistol in his pocket; he'll only nick her, of course, but in his experience, an expression such as that generally heralds the necessity for a head start. "Then why did I find 'Bleak House' hidden under your mattress?"

"Why were you in my bedroom?"

" _You_ do not get to ask me that, Mr. Oncesodomizedacabdriveronmybed." She taps her steepled fingers against her lips.

"I've elected to give him another go."

"Do you know who else likes Dickens?" she asks, divesting her halo for something more smug, a terrible expression, reminds him of his brother. "Tim."

"What an astounding coincidence," he replies, and offering no further repartee, retreats to his room.

* * *

Next day Caroline dons a cap and coat and in her faded sleuthing clothes dashes out to sew up a trifling little case, nothing that should occupy more than an hour, she assures her client: just a little something to keep her brain nimble.

His assistance not being required, he resigns himself to batting those terrible vases off the dining room table: they make a satisfying crash against the far wall. Caroline will lament the mess, but justice having been served in removing their existence from this mortal plane, she ought not to be too terribly inclined to snap at him.

September tests all their windows, and, finding every crack, blows a solemn layer over the flat, so that even the sofa is no longer a refuge, and holding the promise of winter in its cushions, flinches the skin at a touch. He stokes the fire, and rings for a cuppa; Mrs. Hudson has heard the vases, and eyes him evilly when she brings it up, steaming on its tray.

"Thank you, darling," he says, and smoothes her with a smile.

At three o'clock, the bell is rung, and a pair of boots with uneven heels (he does pick up a thing or two from her) makes its way to the second landing, and then down the hall to his own door, where their owner taps somewhat tentatively, being of obvious British persuasion, and comprehending the sanctity of Afternoon Tea.

A client, most likely, too desperate to observe proprieties and come later.

He opens the door to find Tim standing on the other side.

"Hello," he says, which appears to be the extent of his conversational prowess for today, as he sinks both hands into his pockets immediately afterward, and shuts his mouth with apparent permanence.

"Caroline's out, but you can wait in the sitting room, if you like," he offers, not with too much hope in his voice, he's proud to say. You have to leave them panting a bit. He lusts after me, he lusts after me not.

"Actually. I've come to see you," Tim tells him, and wrestling for a moment with the pocket where he's left his right hand, he draws out a pocket square, neatly-folded, absolutely spotless; certainly it isn't his own, in consideration of these observations. "I've had it cleaned. There's nothing left on it." He flushes lightly. "Sure I'm sorry about that." He extends the piece of cloth, his other hand still firmly wedged in his pocket.

"Keep it," he says. "I've a thousand of them." And anyway, darling, you'll want something on which to take our your unsated frustrations, when his presence is unbearably near, and decorum pressing ever at your heels, scrutinizing from ten thousand street corners.

"Right. Thanks a million, then."

And stuffing it back in his pocket, Tim turns to leave. Not terribly deft with either end of the conversation, he sees.

"I've only just finished 'Bleak House'," he blurts out. "It was passable."

"Passable?" Tim asks, turning back to him. "Did you not read the description of the sunlight on the statues, and the shadows waking the portraits, just as if they were living?"

He leans on the door frame, smiling up into the long-lashed eyes. "You could come in and discuss it a bit. Show me the error of my ways," he says, and leaning back into the room, opens up proper space for Tim to pass inside.

For a moment he stands considering this, and then, removing his coat, he crosses the threshold, rolling up his sleeves as he goes.

* * *

In the course of a week, Klaus charms his way past Mrs. Hudson on three separate occasions.

The first time she finds him playing chess with Kol, and arguing over who is cheating more.

The second she interrupts him mid-rifle, with her copy of _Psychopathia Sexualis_ in his sticky little hand. "I didn't know you speak German, love."

"Yes. Do you know what else I speak? Propriety. Would you like me to teach you a few rules? One: Don't break into people's apartments. Two: do. Not. Touch. Their. Things." She snatches the book out of his hand.

He dimples. "You can't speak it very fluently, in men's trousers and with your hair down."

"Out."

"Are you quite certain? I might have any number of your belongings on me." He wiggles his fingers. "I've a thief's fingers, you know. Very deft."

At the risk of causing him great pleasure, she sighs, she pinches the bridge of her nose, she pats him down thoroughly while he holds his arms out to either side and just beams from every pore of him.

"Is that a flask in my pocket, or am I just happy to see you?" he asks, innocently, lifting both his eyebrows.

She removes a chemical phial from his pocket.

The third time, he is sitting at her work table, fussing with all her chemicals, and when she enters the room, without turning, he says, "Bisulphate of baryta; quite tricky to isolate; impressive, sweetheart," and with his long fingers picks up several pipettes and begins to dispatch their contents into various flasks.

* * *

She enjoys two blissfully quiet days.

On the next, Wiggins disappears.

* * *

She's pacing.

She needs…something. Some crack through which to slip, some flaw in this man's method, some mistake by which every human trips themselves up, and, stumbling, now walk imprecisely, and behind them lug all that long convict's line of _presence_ they cannot help dragging after them.

Kol is lying on the sofa, reading something that is very decisively not written by Dickens.

The clock on the mantle tells her it is just after five o'clock. The streets are at full roar, and past her window charge to distant engagements, each of them indistinct though London, mud-colored, and with a malicious twinkle in its clouds, tries to rubber stamp every sooty brow.

She turns to her encyclopedias.

Kol, eyeing this sudden veering from window to bookcase, wisely returns to his book.

Exactly three minutes into her feverish alphabetizing, the bell is rung downstairs.

No, not 'rung', but jerked with such violence the caller's desperation is absorbed into the bell, and it cries out with such human longing.

Kol sits up.

She spins around.

The gait is a beat shorter on the left, and you can hear, if you turn your ears sharply enough, how the coat is more loudly agitated on the side closest to the doors.

He always swings his arm harder on the right side.

"It's Enzo," she says, and yanks open the door. "What's happened?"

He takes the steps two at a time, half-carrying the boy at his side, whose shorter legs cannot manage this stride, and, setting him down on the threshold, looks up at her through his messy bangs, panting from his long run.

"It's Wiggins!" the boy wails before Enzo can get it out. "'E's gone!"

"Ok, Charlie. Go and have a seat in my chair, all right?" she says, and smiles brightly at him, gently steering him into the apartment, and when his back is turned, aiming her grimmest look towards Enzo, who in the meantime has pulled himself together. "What is he talking about?"

"Someone took him, they think. He and Charlie were going about Whitechapel, on a task you'd given them, Charlie says, and round about two or so, he vanishes suddenly. Charlie goes bowling up and down the East End, looking round every nook- and you know they've every one of them scouted- and he comes away completely empty-handed. He's come charging to me only twenty minutes ago, and I've brought him here. He's all in a roar; thinks some pervert may have nipped Wiggins."

Kol is trying to give Charlie absinthe, she finds when she enters the apartment with Enzo on her heels, and she darts forward to snatch the bottle out of his hand. "You can't give him this! He's a child."

"A street child, Caroline. He could probably drink me under the table. And anyway, it'll take the edge off. He clearly needs to have a few sanded off him."

"Then you give him warm _tea_! Seriously-"

"Telegram!" the page Billy interrupts as she inflates herself with just the hugest dressing-down, and putting out one hand to him, she takes it without looking, still turning the leaves of her lecture around in her mind, and examining them from every angle, so she can decide where best to enter into Caroline's Valid Life Lessons.

"Caroline," Enzo says, taking it from her hand.

"Charlie, put your hands over your ears. Kol, I _swear_ -"

" _Caroline_ ," Enzo says once more, with uncharacteristic sharpness, and she half-turns to take the telegram in numb fingers as he shoves it at her.

"'Be at the third pillar from the left outside the Lyceum Theatre to-night at seven o'clock. If you are distrustful bring two friends. The boy is unharmed, but that may well be subject to change. Do not bring police. If you do, all will be in vain. Your unknown friend.'"

She turns the telegram about in her fingers, once, twice, and then, setting it down carefully on the table while the boys diligently follow every teeniest twitch of her fingers, she says, "Kol, which of your mansions is Klaus' favorite?"

* * *

He doesn't open the door himself.

He's waiting at the head of the dining room table, with his fingers steepled.

Ten thousand (she has exaggerated minutely) dishes waft their exotic steams ceiling-ward. The floor echoes back each firm step, which she has made certain, she has assured will touch its toes to every marble tile like a queen descending her dais, but she thinks, looking at his face, looking at his smile: this is the wrong approach.

It's always the wrong approach with him.

He will always smile in exactly this enamored way like the gas lamps, the chandeliers, these are all superfluous inventions of men who are not already aware, Caroline Forbes invented the sun, and carries it around in her pocket.

"Where is he?" she asks.

"You were supposed to go to the Lyceum Theatre."

"I am not playing your _games_ , Klaus. Where is Wiggins?"

He snaps his fingers. It is all he ever has to do, and before you can blink, his every hope and wish just... _materializes_.

Two men escort Wiggins into the dining hall.

And she was going to hurry over to him, she was going to take him in her arms and suffer these long-distant pangs of motherhood women like her are not supposed to feel, but he comes out skipping, with a glow in his cheeks, and, going over to Klaus, shakes his hand heartily.

She freezes.

"'Ello, Ms. Forbes. You wasn't worried? Mr. Mikaelson, 'e's a smashin' chap. Smashin'. 'E can kidnap me anytime 'e likes, I say."

"Johnathon; if you would have a cab sent round for the boy," Klaus says to one of the lackeys, not looking away from her.

Wiggins is taken off in a shower of compliments under which Klaus smirks so hard she might be concerned about permanent damage to his face, if she were inclined to be concerned about anything regarding his face, which she most certainly is definitely not. "Ok," she says coldly. "Well, if there's already a cab."

He basically vaults out of his chair, and mid-leap his dignity makes this sudden assertion of will to remind him, right, you have to do everything at approximately half the pace of a normal man if the peons are to know just how casually you take life because it bends its every head to your capricious will, and in each shift of weather, industry, revolution, wonders to itself, how might I better Serve?

He straightens his dinner jacket and with his hands behind his back now rounds the table like he's on some leisurely stroll.

"Dinner's already set," he points out.

"I am not having dinner with you. You just kidnapped a child!"

"Who has not a mark upon him, and got five shillings out of it, to boot." He makes this really annoying contemplative face. "That's…five times what you pay him, isn't it?"

"Are you trying to steal my employees?"

"Of course not. That would be unethical." He dimples.

"Yeah. And you are the very pinnacle of ethical aspiration."

"I do enjoy these little _salles_ , Caroline."

He's stopped using 'Ms. Forbes'. It bothers her. He wants there to be no distance between them; he wants not the formal wall of societal respectability, but this long intimacy of man and wife, who in the depths of their abodes are allowed all sorts of scandalous ankle caressing.

"Anyway. Not nice seeing you," she says, and smiles her best Savage Southerner farewell.

She must cut at least three arteries.

"If you're not hungry, perhaps you'd enjoy a round or two about my gallery?" he offers, with this infuriating touch of innocence, because he has precisely calculated it to pause her mid-step, to stay the rustling skirts, to bring boiling to her foremost recollections every slippery little niche of him that she cannot take hold of.

He has shown her this one piece, he has let her have this one true and genuine thing.

You can read every lost philosophical tome, plucked from the ashes of Alexandria. But humans don't keep their souls there. All the messiest parts of them, every failure, every dream, every striving, these they take, and they put into their art.

She hesitates.

She can know, without turning, how he licks his lips, and tilts his head down so he can look up through his lashes, so he can see all the world, and the world must look back at him from this awkward angle, and try to pull from this contrived expression anything real, anything like what other men tamp down under their surface, but never really hide.

She turns slowly back to him.

She doesn't need to say 'yes': he is already smiling.

* * *

He's nervous.

And that's such a small, human thing, it reaches down past her reason, past her experience, it plucks some distant string that sings out in these strange yearnings towards fellow creatures who live and die and wander.

She turns over the pages on his work table and stands before each painting for seconds, minutes, whole eternities.

She knows in every monster there is some mundane hobbyist, mechanically filling his hours.

But his paintings leap from their frames; his drawings sit up and keen. Along these walls whole populations live, all these little bits of him he's found somewhere, somehow and mercilessly cut out with his charcoal.

"That is of my brother Henrik," he says for the first time in minutes as she examines a painting of a boy, some ten years of age. "He died when he was very young. Shortly after he sat for this, actually."

"Kol's mentioned him. Once," she replies, softly, she doesn't know why, but there's this…strain between them, not a jagged thing, this pressure, she doesn't know how to describe it, a quiet thing, no thunderstorm prescience but a harbinger of something different, some prehistoric comprehension between humans. "Consumption. My father died of it."

"Recently?"

"Three years ago. But you don't know that, when they're not there."

"I'm sorry," he says, and he means it. She doesn't know how to take that. She thinks: so there was this guy with a brother, and he loved him. And then how do you abandon that, how are you touched by humanity, there's not some cold hole in you which it forgot to fill, it exists, it has its own space, and under its arm gathers every loved face, cherishing them all, and then suddenly, you just…you let go?

She reaches out for a sketchpad sitting on the worktable, closed, and touches the cover with the tips of her fingers.

Klaus rips it out from under her.

"What the _hell_ , Klaus? What's in that one? Do you come home and sketch dead prostitutes so you can relive your most infamous crimes? 'I call this one 'Pulling the Wool Over Caroline'," she says, not entirely seriously.

He's completely silent.

" _Do_ you?" she demands, and lunges for it.

There is a brief struggle over the sketchpad. Beezlebub the Fair, Ruler of Man, God, and Gravity (seriously, how he coerces his curls into cooperating every second of the day, come rain, wind, or soot, she would absolutely love to know), fumbles it like a child still developing their motor skills.

She takes off across the gallery, flipping it open as she goes.

They're not prostitutes.

They're her.

He has recreated her down to every minuscule detail, in every pose, in every emotion, through the whole broad range of her expressions, with such accuracy she finds in her hands instead of vellum a mirror.

In some twisted part of her, she thinks: he noticed there's the tiniest hint of a dimple in her left cheek when she's truly happy?

Aloud, she says, "This is creepy."

"Kol did them."

She gives him a Look.

"Kol hates drawing. It requires sitting still for long periods of time. The only way I can distract him from dismantling our apartment is by putting a book in his hand, and then you better hope it's something saucy, with scandal in it. The only reason the apartment is even still standing is because I keep him on a steady diet of sensation literature. So, no, he did not do these. Please try and respect the fact that I'm a genius, sans external genitalia and everything."

He looks oddly chastised; it disturbs her. She doesn't like being put on this sort of footing with him; she wants to always remember: he is not a man, not quite.

Carefully, so their fingers do not touch, she returns the sketchpad to him.

He stands looking down, like a boy, worrying the edges of it with his big hands.

But then he sneaks this look back up at her, he's checking to see how this wily little touch has charmed her, see how unthreatening, endearing, apple-cheeked I can be, he asks her with this look, and ruins it with his smile.

And there's this…relief. She feels something release in her. She feels the world, suddenly capsizing under her, abruptly right and steam along on its former course. He is always devious, shrewd, he always presents exactly what he wants seen; there are no inadvertent discoveries. What you grab hold of you have been handed.

But he keeps the sketchpad under his arm as they stroll along another wall, so she can't get at it anymore.

"Have you thought anymore on my proposal?" he asks.

"What proposal?" she asks absently, stopping in front of a portrait of a beautiful blonde woman in a dress of burgundy silk.

"The flat in Whitechapel."

"I'm pretty sure I very decisively turned you down by pointing out that every probability points to you murdering me in my sleep."

"I thought I'd assuaged that fear rather tidily, love. And, exactly how close are you to closing in on the murderer?"

"You know the answer to that; you really don't need to rub it in my face," she replies distractedly. "Who is this woman?"

"My sister Rebekah. I'm sure Kol's mentioned her a time or two."

"Strange. I've never met her, but there's something…familiar?"

"Perhaps you're merely struck by the uniformity by which genetics have blessed the Mikaelson siblings?" he asks, smiling.

"Or maybe she's a stalker like her big brother and what I'm remembering is all that tingly back of the neck _wrongness_ people tend to experience in the presence of your family?"

"You feel tingly whenever I'm about?"

She gives him another Look.

She moves along to the next painting, lingering on the technicality, and glossing over its soul. He shadows her down the room, watching her face, not even glancing to see what she is reacting to, but rather letting the reactions themselves absorb him.

Finally, ten minutes into a silence he is apparently determined not to break first, she says, "Fine. I accept."

And then she turns, so she can look him eye to eye when she destroys him: "But Enzo comes with me."

* * *

 **A/N: Sorry about the long wait; I haven't had as much time to write over the last few weeks, and there's a lot of research involved in this. Anyway, thank you for reading. I know you're all wondering when the hell KC is going to do it: all in good time. The next update will show them cohabitating in Whitechapel (with their chaperone Enzo), so they'll get to it eventually, I promise. Up next: more murder, Kol and Tim take over the flat while Caroline is gone and have a go at this detecting thing; it can't be all that hard. Besties Klaus and Enzo deepen their bond. Caroline seriously contemplates holding Klaus under the Thames until his feet stop kicking.**

 **I estimate this will be around fourish parts of equal size, so we've still got a couple of updates to go.**


	3. Part Three

**A/N: Hello and welcome to the hotly-anticipated next part in a fic we kind of (me included) all forgot about. I have risen from the ashes of my personal life and black writerly depression to bring you this collection of overwritten facts about Victorian London (bonus: Klaus' lousy poetry).**

 **Some historical notes: according to a shoe size chart from the Victorian era that I looked up, Tim's feet are in fact quite large; 13 was the second largest size in men's that one shop was offering, so probably that does bode well for Kol. The conversion for his weight is 193 1/2 lbs. (Caroline is nothing if not precise). The potato man was a real street show in Victorian London (though the account I read took place a little earlier than this story is set), because when you don't have TV, you have to entertain yourself somehow.**

 **The smoke-rocket Kol has is what Sherlock Holmes used in _A Scandal in Bohemia_ to determine where Irene Adler was hiding her blackmail photos. Kol, of course, uses it for evil instead of good. 'Le Fanu' is a reference to J. Sheridan Le Fanu, an Irish author who wrote many gothic tales and ghost stories (plus a vampire novel that predates _Dracula_ and inspired some of its mythos; also: lesbians). Wilkie Collins was the author of numerous novels from the sensation lit genre (and a friend of Dickens'). **

_**J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement**_ **is an 1884 short story by Conan Doyle that was first published anonymously in _Cornhill Magazine_. Some took it as a true statement from a real survivor and reprinted it as a factual story, despite the fact that some of the key details did not add up with what was then known about the disappearance of the _Mary Celeste_.**

 **Also, the headings on the telegrams are postal branches. I imagine the poor, overworked postal employee probably wants to kill them all.**

 **Anyway; that's all for now. I hope you enjoy all the murder and these characters acting exactly like they always have in any of my stories, even though they're now human and should probably calm the fuck down a bit.**

 **P.S. I really wish this miserable site would just let me put some extra space between things instead of having to use a line break for EVERYTHING.**

* * *

 **Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

 **A Quick Reminder of Caroline's House Rules:**

 **1\. No smoking**

 **2\. No cocaine**

 **3\. The couch is EXACTLY perpendicular to the analysis table (I'll** ** _know_** **)**

 **4\. No sex**

* * *

 **Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

 **5\. Put my manifesto on poisons back EXACTLY where it was shelved**

 **6\. No fires in non-designated fire areas**

 **7\. Actually no fires in the fireplace either; we all remember the incident of spring '87**

* * *

 **Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

 **8\. Do not woo, harass, titillate, or otherwise shock the clients**

 **9\. Do not SLEEP with the clients**

 **10\. No sex no sex no sex no SEX**

* * *

 **Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

 **And since I know you're going to ignore every single one of these, at least keep me apprised of the damage so I can relax a little. My imagination can conjure up things even you're not capable of.**

* * *

 **Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

 **Please do not take that as a challenge.**

 **Love you.**

 **P.S. Your brother is completely unbearable**

* * *

 **Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

 **One minor explosion. Mrs. Hudson has been placated. Nik's absolute rubbish adolescent poetry to follow.**

* * *

 **Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

 **In rosy dawn**

 **I do fawn**

 **Over your scintillating eyeball orbs like a light left on**

 **I assume there was some concern over whether or not the reader would comprehend the true roundness of the eyeballs. Also, the grammar compels one to ask precisely what is 'like a light left on'; the eyeball orbs, or Nik's fawning?**

* * *

 **Handed in at Borough High St To: Kol Mikaelson**

 **You are my favorite human (and I'm even including Enzo in that).**

* * *

 **Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

 **A 16-year-old attempt at 'erotic' poetry:**

 **Through your petals**

 **I did glimpse the kettles**

 **Of passion boiling boiling**

 **With wicked alchemy like foreign metals**

* * *

 **Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

 **There once was a lady**

 **She was called Katie**

 **On our meeting did lie the touch of Fate(ie)**

* * *

 **Handed in at Borough High Street To: Kol Mikaelson**

 **I believe you recall my solution to the problem of Bekah's 2** **nd** **husband; let's not render it necessary that I repeat such methodology, brother.**

* * *

 **Handed in at Borough High Street To: Kol Mikaelson**

 **I should think you don't have to worry about that last telegram, mate. Only Caroline is allowed to threaten her boys, as you know. Best dressing-down I ever did see. Punching him in the face wasn't nearly as satisfactory.**

* * *

 **Handed in at Charing Cross To: Lorenzo St. John**

 **Ask Nik to draw a picture of it next time.**

* * *

 **Handed in at Borough High Street To: Kol Mikaelson**

 **Will do, mate. How's the flat?**

* * *

 **Handed in at Charing Cross To: Lorenzo St. John**

 **Intact, actually. We're all very surprised/overwhelmed/a bit teary-eyed with pride. I have moved the sofa and both chairs, and swapped the analysis table with the dining table. Burn this telegram after you receive it. It's better if it's a surprise.**

* * *

 **Handed in at Borough High Street To: Kol Mikaelson**

 **! KOL. ANTHONY. MIKAELSON. I'M SO UPSET I'VE ACTUALLY MADE UP A MIDDLE NAME FOR YOU. DO. NOT. TOUCH. THE. ANALYSIS. TABLE.**

* * *

 **Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

 **Oh, but not Anthony; that's terrible. How about something like 'Zeuscock'?**

* * *

 **Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

 **Nothing, darling?**

* * *

 **Handed in at Borough High Street To: Kol Mikaelson**

 **Please hear my extremely drawn-out sigh in your head, and just give me a status report.**

* * *

 **Handed in at Charing Cross To: Caroline Forbes**

 **Well, as you know, I've rearranged the entire flat. One (relatively less minor) explosion. Three new bullet holes. Some opium, and I'm diligently working on violating the No sex no sex no sex no SEX rule, rest assured, darling.**

* * *

From the bookcase he extracts the ledger which Caroline keeps on her employees, meticulously alphabetized, and dusted with constant unshelvings, so the cover is freshly smug beside its more neglected brethren.

Timothy Patrick O'Sullivan, 6' 4", 87.7701 kg. Born April 14, 1863. Shoe size: 13 (that bodes well for him, don't you think?). In her regimentally neat script, she has also noted his chest, waist, hip and inseam measurements, and below this recorded several of his more mundane habits, among them a propensity for playing with his pocket watch, a preference for peppermint candy, and a partiality to pistols of German manufacture (he does hope you enjoy this searing succession of alliteration, darlings; a more overwritten passage Nik himself could not manage in those florid underage floggings of grammar, common decency, and good taste*).

*Forgive him his sins, and may your soul and eyes convalesce from what purple gymnastics Nik has prepared in honour of hurtling this particular gauntlet.

Tim has three scars from childhood (a rowdy cousin, dog, and switch-wielding mother, respectively), and in his first youth worked in some proximity to sheep; in his second, he plies the St. Katharine Docks with a gang comprised mostly of Dublin émigrés, the head of which is called John McDonald, and can generally be located on the west dock.

He returns the ledger to its proper place, lining it up precisely with its neighbor volumes (he's not entirely reckless), and proceeds in a cab to the entrance of the gates, and from there on foot, with his hands in his pockets, and in one of his scrubbier suits, so the pickpockets do not all rush him at once, making here a grab there a grab for the dandy and his fat wallet. He's on a schedule; and anyway, he's left his bat at home, which if not the sole method of dispatching ruffians, is certainly the most entertaining. Anyone can shoot a man.

The clouds are in uncommonly good spirits this evening. Sunset has just dyed the undersides of them, and flung down its handful of paint, which the men carry about in their beards as they scurry from ship to warehouse conveying their sugar sacks and rolls of carpeting. All along the Thames the steamships with grave impatience tower over these diligent ant's nests, gliding with silent judgement up to their own locks, and throwing open the hatches for the waiting laborers.

He's made to stroll along the locks for some time before spotting a head taller than those surrounding it, and, double-taking, he confirms its identity by way of the blue eyes, momentarily visible beneath the brim of that hat, and the tuft of hair at the nape of the neck as Tim, alighting on the dock, turns back to shout good-bye to one of the men on deck.

There's a group of some dozen men clustered near one of the hatches, and a little ginger-bearded man in their midst, dispensing shillings from one hand, and with the other marking down notations in a fat notebook; Tim joins the queue politely, and in the interim between queue and payment making three checks of his pocket watch, which a more gracious man might take as a sign of previous engagement, and leave him to his appointment.

He waits at the end of the dock, stirring his fingers about his pockets (mildly ruinous to his casual poise) and with one ear listening to that cacophony unique to all harbours, where squalling Nature confronts the working man, and tussles grievously with him, and who shall rise the victor depends entirely upon her current pique, and how deeply either sea or wind has taken it to heart.

Today the labourers and ship captains out-shout her, those marble slabs which smell of far winters wrestle the Thames for dominance, and in a stalemate combine that sickly amalgamation of foreign quarries and sewage. The warehouses emit and admit opposing streams of labourers hauling crates or strolling empty-armed back to their cargo; if the wares do not overpower the Thames, certainly the men's sweat will gladly try its hand.

His other ear, aimed back along the dock, picks up the sound of footsteps. Caroline, without looking, and carrying on a conversation about the asymmetry of carbon-bonds, would absently pin down the exact height, weight, probable occupation, and presence/absence of facial hair of this unseen stroller whilst curling her hair and jotting down cigar ash varieties. He is, of course, merely an extraordinarily handsome mortal, and must hazard a guess.

He slicks back his hair and looks away from the line of men continuously streaming from the nearest warehouse.

Tim has stopped a few feet down the dock, for a moment taken aback, and then his face blossoms in one of those smiles which the wearer barely notices, and still less can help. "What are you doing here?"

"Just out for a stroll. Fancy meeting you here," he says with the same smile; it's quite annoying.

"Oh really?"

"Actually, I've orders from Caroline."

"And what has she for us today?" Tim asks, closing the distance between them leisurely, and with his hands in his pockets. His shirt is stained with some twelve hours of unloading; he's rolled the sleeves back to his elbows, so all the forearm muscles are on fortuitous display. One might almost be distracted from the three buttons he's undone, to let the Thames' pungent winds cool his chest.

"Actually, I've made that up as well," he says as they fall into step, heading toward the south gate. "But you're a bit charmed, aren't you, that I didn't want to admit I'd come all the way here to see you?"

"More so before you started blowing your own trumpet over it." Tim smiles at him out of the corner of his eye.

"Fancy a drink?"

"Oh." Tim pauses, jingling the watch in his pocket, and for a moment undergoing some struggle of bashfulness which is to him as profound a mystery as Caroline's puzzlement over how the length of a man's sleeve could not possibly indicate anything to him other than some piddling difference in centimeters. "I've actually saved a bit of money…I thought I'd pop down to the Irish Exhibition in Olympia tonight." He attempts to dig a hole in the dock with the toe of his boot. "Would you…like to come?"

"I always like to come," he says, and slings one arm around Tim's shoulders.

* * *

 _But these are trifling details. Of what interest is a dock labourer and an aristocrat who has not yet purged his propensity for slumming? In every monarchy can be found dabbles with commoners; one soon blots its lustre from the eye. Novelty is of necessity a mortal glow, and dies having uttered its first wondrous exclamations._

 _Shall we follow this prince and his pauper through dust and rabble, marinate ourselves in the scent of cheap beer and the unwashed masses, wend past these thatched roofs who secrete in their straws the faraway mosses of Ireland, stop when our secondary characters must goggle over this supreme miracle of sixty Kerry cows switching their tails beside these fairy dust manipulations of milk into butter- are we to laugh when, having consumed enough beer to transform him from mouse to man, the dock labourer is persuaded not only to watch without protest his better companion take up arms at the replica castle, but in fact to participate himself? When the true stars of our narrative reside on the far side of London, contributing with wit and dignity to stories yet untold?_

 _Surely He is a far more fascinating specimen than a paltry scuffle over a mock siege, and some drunken blunder through the village with half a dozen performers on their heels. Kol has been ejected from many a public event; whether he outruns the coordinators of this one is of no consequence._

 _If instead you wish to observe all of humanity's attributes in one convenient location, and the one mind which is nearly not inferior to His own, follow my pen, back through those entrance caves of limestone and sandstone, beneath the stalactites which have long since nodded off, trembling at no earthly fury, and leaving in your wake the cries of the Exhibition goers, and that peculiar scent which its organizers have distilled from Eire herself, where green is no mere hue but a manifestation of our every waking sense. There are humans not so animate as an Irish green (most of whom can be found in Parliament)._

 _With that perception unique to writers (the talented ones, anyway), I find it necessary to now relate the singular adventure of the Moran Incident. If you have kept a diligent eye to your papers, you will hear the familiarity with which this name lightly plucks at your consciousness, and find in some deep recess a jumble of minor biographical details: Colonel Sebastian Moran, formerly of Her Majesty's Indian Army, a heavy-game shot the likes of which the Empire and indeed Europe has never bested or even replicated. I shall allow further descriptions of his character an significance in this tale to fall from lovelier mouths._

* * *

Enzo is sitting on the bed Klaus absolutely, unequivocally, in the most condescending terms possible, declared as his own, eating a pork chop he conjured from…somewhere (Enzo's talents for food acquisition are beyond even her observational powers).

They're staring at one another.

Klaus' nose and mouth pinch together when he's genuinely put out; everything shrinks to this one little point, leaving the eyes swimming about almost independent of the rest of his face, squintier than usual, but of no real competition for his old woman lips, ten thousand lemons into their temper tantrum.

Enzo drips pork fat on the bed.

She is deciphering the notebooks she has found hidden all around the flat, half a dozen of them spread out over the cot which she has already dragged into one dusty corner and prettied with a new comforter and a pot of geraniums, carefully arranged on the windowsill beside it. She works clockwise, scribbling notes in the margins of each book before moving on to the next, and in this way blazing through each page; he has coordinated them to be read together, so that in the absence of one notebook, the others are indecipherable; mildly clever.

"The problem with your cipher," she says, bouncing the pencil on her lip, "is that you think you're smarter than literally everyone in the world."

"Get. Off. My. Bed," he snarls at Enzo.

She rolls her eyes, and makes three more notations.

Enzo's chewing increases in volume; he makes no other response.

Klaus will make one more demand. In precisely forty-five seconds, Enzo will condescend to acknowledge him. A gun will be pulled.

At thirty seconds she finishes her current note and, standing, crosses the room to touch Klaus' hand at the thirty five second mark, before Enzo can look up, before he can drip another calculated splotch of fat onto the ragged blanket, before the hand which she touches now, and squeezes warningly, can remove its sweatily-clutched pistol, and bring it to bear. "Boys. Why argue, when you can instead spend your time making yourselves useful?" She takes the map tucked into her pocket, and opens it with a crisp snap. "Now: I've already circled the three remaining pawnshops we haven't yet checked. Here are the descriptions of Annie Chapman's rings, and a list of questions to ask. We'll take one each," she says, handing out the scraps of paper with their inked instructions, and each man's name helpfully noted at the top. (Enzo's already has a cheery 'good job!' marked down at the bottom; Klaus' is glaringly blank.) You can't let men think about their commands for too long, so she clicks her tongue at them both, and flapping her hands, shoos them along toward the door.

"Be careful," she tells Enzo, adjusting his collar, and smoothing the hair off his forehead. She'll need to cut it again.

"You too, gorgeous," he says, and, holding one another at arms-length, they exchange cheek kisses.

Klaus she ignores.

* * *

In Virginia, summer gets a prolonged death, and expires in a gentle breath of tenderized fruit trees, ripened by their illness. But a mid-September London doesn't have time for that; it isn't going to gentle you into anything. It sneaks up behind you, and with one yellow breath, blows out the sun, blots the lamps, makes of all these labouring peoples one massless sensation to haunt your peripheral senses. The soot and the fog and the rain all blend together into one amateur watercolor, when the artist has calmly seen to nothing, and let everything rise in monochrome insouciance.

But today the sun has decided nope, no sir; it's broken through the clouds. Onto the faces and the horses and the food stalls it slops its brightest rays, and if the wind cries after to remind the beggars even here, on the heels of nature's best plumage, are winter's raw tabulations, already counting up its victims, at least for a moment, in the sun, the dust, all these wild flurries of scent, sound, _life_ , there is somewhere a hothouse spring, welcoming new roses.

A milk woman hobbles under her yoke, her empty cans jingling along toward the dairy. At every step the beggar children assault the best-dressed pedestrians, proffering the sores they have crafted from a paste of oatmeal, vinegar, and berry juice; they scratch at real lice, and tilt their faces to showcase the soot shadows beneath their eyes. From the food vendors the warm steams of canned potatoes and all those penny pies with their hidden caches- the glistening puddings and wilting watercress and oysters at three for a penny, all these vent their buttery temptations and the sour coal of an overenthusiastic grill, the sweet creams, the saccharine reek of horse manure, wafting its half-digested alfalfas-

Klaus has followed her.

She slips between two food stalls and hops up out of the street, onto the pavement, and suddenly he is right beside her, smiling.

"Your pawn shop is that way," she says rudely, pointing behind her. "I know, because I very carefully arranged it so I could get as far away from you as possible while ensuring you're still actually useful to me. The shops are closing soon. So instead of stalking me, why don't you go complete your assigned task, and then you can report back to me, and maybe I'll…" She twirls one hand in the air, thinking. "I don't know. Exchange five minutes of forced small talk with you."

"You don't have to worry about my 'assignment', love," he says, and snaps his fingers.

A man in tattered but clean shirt and trousers pops up right in front of them; wordlessly, he takes the instructions Klaus holds out, and with this same eerie silence, melts away into the crowd, where he is immediately swallowed by the beggars. "Don't worry, sweetheart; he's competent. Anyone who works for me and proves himself useless doesn't last for very long."

She increases her stride.

He is four inches taller, and easily matches it.

He has this way of walking; it pisses her off. He keeps his hands behind his back, agilely dodging horse manure, miscellaneous trash, those marshy bits of roadway that have clung most stubbornly to the last rainstorm, and never does he break this position, he has no concern of pickpockets, cutthroats, drunken cab drivers; he just strolls along, smiling at her. There's this whole aura about him; you can't break it. The pickpockets who eye him turn aside; the beggars are immediately off in quest of other marks; he doesn't even have to look at them. He doesn't have to lower himself like that. He just walks along, trailing…something in his wake, and you feel it touch the edges of you, you feel, quivering, this unnatural brush, you have not been touched physically, no, no mundane such grazings for Beezlebub Satington III, and yet you _know_ : cast down your eyes, and walk just a little faster.

He probably practices in front of his mirror as diligently as any lady navigating imaginary omnibus ladders.

But, see, what pisses her off most: he looks so happy, just to be walking next to her.

You don't dehumanize the worst of men; history is this lazy cyclical thing: it will run along in the same grooves forever, and stupid man pushing it along with his shoulder, wondering why he feels the same dirt beneath his boots, and the same tree flashes its laden old branches, exchanging its apples for snow, endlessly. When you take men, and you mold them out of some fantastical clay, you say to yourself, but _we_ are not of the same earth, the next atrocity may be by your own unstained hands.

But neither do you look at him, and you see his smile, you see, once in a while, he takes some time from kicking babies and skinning old women (she has this theory: he makes coats out of them) to trail along after a girl, not molesting her, not even talking to her, just existing in her shadow, and hoping she'll look up- you don't _see that_ and think oh _oh_ : he's like any other man after all.

It is humans who commit our atrocities, always.

But you can't let the worst of them slither into your conscience, and pinch it to wakefulness because there are parts of them that are warm, and vulnerable, and once, somewhere, there was a mother.

Probably even she hated his stupid dimples.

"Ok," she says, because this is quite enough, thank you, and she pulls out another map from her pocket, unfolding it to reveal all the murder sites, carefully circled. Next from her trouser pocket she retrieves a little notepad, and a stub of pencil, and she shoves them at him. "You dictate; I'll talk. So. Let's go over the similarities between these murders again. All prostitutes; all murdered in the early hours. They were all mutilated, and each of them had a fondness for drink, which is not exactly uncommon when you have to make your living by letting literally any penis stick itself in you, but let's hold onto that anyway. And you didn't recognize Annie Chapman; so maybe the victims are not your employees, and the first two were just coincidences. Wait; how many prostitutes do you have employed as spies? Enough that it's entirely possibly two could just randomly fall victim to a murderer because you have that many of them in your pocket, or few enough that it's a notable event?"

"Enough," he says, and hands the notepad back to her.

He's encoded all the notes he's just taken; not the cipher from the notebooks he's stored around his flat: it's nothing she's ever seen before.

She stops in the middle of the street, and smoothly he takes her arm.

"Let's not tarry, shall we? There's a gentleman over there who's eyeing the contents of your purse."

She gives this little huff.

He is _so_ pleased with himself; he doesn't let go of her arm.

He does shoot a withering look at a man who, flicking aside his cigarette, double takes at the sight of a woman in full men's clothing, with her hair down.

"Let's start again," she says.

"We know he is habitually about in the early hours of the morning, though this, of course, hardly narrows our search much. He strikes when the girls are tired, drunk, not particularly picky from whence comes their last pennies. At these hours, they're only scrounging for the last bit that will get them a bed. Now, could a labourer really work twelve to fourteen hour days, feed himself, stumble home to his family- could he really have time to form such fantasies, let alone enact them? No; hardly. So you meant to say, hmm?"

"No," she replies, with just enough crispness that he knows he has recited nearly word-for-word her unspoken diatribe.

"You won't catch him spinning vague descriptions which any number of men could fit."

"Why don't you leave the actual apprehension of criminals to me? It's not like you would know anything about justice."

"Ah, but how can you understand the mind of a criminal unless you interrogate one, sweetheart? Thoroughly?"

They share this sideways look.

It sends this little chill down her spine. He always holds her eyes for too long; if she didn't look away-

But she does look away.

He always stuffs his pockets with bits of carrot and apple before leaving their flat, so he can feed them to every horse not thoroughly invested in its nosebag, and stands for long minutes stroking their muzzles, and murmuring to them. "Come and give him a rub," he says to her, pressing his forehead to one placid old gelding who leans into the touch, and lips questioningly at Klaus' jacket.

"What did you write in this?" she asks, squinting at the notepad.

"That's for you to determine, isn't it?"

He moves away from the horse with a smile.

He tries to start all sorts of non-criminally motivated conversations with her. He wants to know everything: what does she like, what does she hope, what does she _dream_?

"I don't know," she says, taken off-guard. She doesn't; there is a gap for women like her, who, with no recourse for marriage and children, flounder in between. She has two friends; she isn't invited to balls. (Kol once rectified that by crashing the fourth Viscount Melbourne's latest gala and absconding with the hostess, to be faultlessly replaced by one Caroline Marie Forbes, who for ten minutes received a line of oblivious guests before a close acquaintance of the hostess uncovered the little scam, and had a constable fetched.)

She has clients. She has that.

"I like…gardening," she says, unexpectedly. "It's relaxing. I mean…I only know how to cultivate poisonous plants. Kol complains that he can't smell, eat or touch half the things in the apartment."

Halfway to the pawn shop, he makes her laugh. She doesn't mean to. You don't _enjoy_ men like this; you jail them.

But she laughs.

And three quarters of the way to the shop, she calls out, "The potato man!" and veers violently to one side, dragging Klaus after her, and into a circle of spectators who have ringed themselves around a middle-aged bald man.

"You're in for a treat today," the man calls out to the crowd. "I've some Yorkshire Reds, the hardest potato that grows. Three pence, ladies and gents, let's have three pence into the ring," he says, and into the ring clink clink clink the three pennies, and now the man's hand disappears to its wrist in his potato sack, and all the waiting spectators lean forward in bated anticipation.

"Kol once spent a pound on this man," she tells Klaus. "Just watching him throw potatoes over and over again. I entertained him for a whole twenty minutes, and didn't even need to set anything on fire."

The big hand comes out clutching its chosen potato, and then suddenly the man fires it skyward, up, up it hurtles, clearing the roofs of the houses, piercing somewhere the gathering clouds waiting with ominous certainty for the sun to slip up, you follow it as far as possible, pointing it out between industrial soot, and looming tenement, and meanwhile the man just folds his arms, and thrusts his head calmly forward.

He always catches it.

Gravity reasserts its dominance, the potato tumbles end over end, every eye roves over to this gleaming head, placid, staid, it's a forehead entirely unbothered by any human annoyance, you see in it the hazy flickering of men's hats, horse's tails, the endlessly winking winking puddles- but of the potato you see nothing, surely it's overshot him, surely he hasn't-

But he has.

The head tilts precisely. The arms stay folded. The eyes, unblinking, contemplate some inner trouble.

The potato explodes across his forehead.

The crowd cheers.

"Fourpence!" he roars out. "Let's see what I can do with fourpence!"

And into the ring tink tink the required admission.

She's clapping when she spots the man out of the corner of her eye.

Klaus is staring at her, and smiling. She suspects he has no idea what role the sack of potatoes plays in this man's performance; he may not have even noticed the stranger who now diverts her attention.

At the fringes of the crowd is this man, prowling: no spectator walks like this, alert to every turn of the stone beneath his boots, and blast of the cook steams against his back. Pedestrians are these numb unconcerned things; aimless, or, with their head down laboring toward this one specific goal that throbs somewhere in the city, beckoning them on.

He reaches for his pocket.

"Klaus-" she says, but not in time.

Two shots ring out.

Potato, man, crowd- they all go shrieking into distances that promise them some illusion of safety.

Klaus staggers against her.

The man fires once more; she feels Klaus shudder against her, and now they both pitch to the side.

He's too heavy to hold up; she tries. She grabs for the collar of his jacket instinctively, trying to press him into her, to keep him upright if swaying, but all his weight slumps into her from an awkward angle, and down they go, and she never knows why, but somehow, she comes up holding his cheeks when they land on the street.

He opens his eyes foggily.

"Klaus. _Klaus_ ," she says, sharply, like she cares.

There's this moment where they're staring at one another; she still has his face in her hands. He's lying half across her lap, blinking.

All the color has left him. He looks like…like his brother. Just for a moment, just long enough for her to see the same mother in their cheeks, and a different father in their brows.

She touches his stubble with her thumbs.

* * *

"Why aren't you bleeding?" Caroline demands, yanking open his coat.

The bullets have dumbfounded him; he flails after his breath as a man who finds himself abruptly in the sea. "The…vest," he gasps, and clutching at her arm he braces himself against her as the little hands touch his chest and the forehead is now furrowed with curiosity in place of her concern. "It's…bullet resistant."

She tilts her head, and the eyes roll heavenward. "Of course you would be prepared for some random to walk up and shoot you in the middle of the day while you're watching a man breaking potatoes over his head. You probably get that a lot, with your personality."

Sadly, future generations must forever write themselves his ingenious response; he chokes in trying to utter it, and has to lean into her as these little hands lift him with the strength of a man, and raising him to seated position, now begin to explore the layer beneath his jacket. "Silk?" she asks, a rhetorical muttering to which he is not required to reply. "This is actually…did you develop this? Just nod," she adds, with cautious exploration feeling over its seams, and dipping her fingertips into the indentations which his assassin has left in the fabric. " _Don't_ move," she snaps, and bolsters this command with an open-handed slap to the shoulder which he is most happy to observe jars him against her as she leans over to inspect what damage has been inflicted upon his person. "You've probably broken something. You may not be dead, but you were just shot three times with a .44."

"A fact which surely will be hastily remedied by your hitting me."

She looks down at him severely. "You're lucky I'm still here. I could have said, "Oh, nice, someone took care of it for me," and left you to die in the street. By the way, I didn't have time to see much of him; sorry. Just that he was about 5' 8", 145 pounds, brown-haired, hazel eyes…" She closes her own eyes for a moment, still clutching him, and now the brows gently mingle, the eyelids flicker, the face in this great transcendary clutch becomes suddenly ethereal, as if in her is some hand which has adjusted the wick of that inner lamp, and turning it up, suffused the whole being with deific luster. If there is any man who can regain his breath before such a sight, hale or infirm, let him try and present his findings; scientists will have need of such a Herculean triumph.

"Right-handed," she continues. "He very slightly favored his left side, but I don't think it was an injury; just an uneven gait. I'd say…31 or 32. He was recently in Spitalfields, within the last hour or two." She opens her eyes. "That's it."

"Your 'paltry' description notwithstanding, there are only a few candidates with the temerity to risk such an attack. And since you were standing beside me the entire time, and Bekah would have never left it to some impersonal third party, there's only one remaining suspect."

"It wouldn't be a certain ambitious second lieutenant whose initials are Colonel Sebastian Moran, would it?" she asks, and pulling his arm round her shoulders, helps him to his feet with hardly any appearance of strain. Perhaps Enzo has rendered himself mildly useful and seen to her physical conditioning.

He laughs and clutches for his ribs as he does so, noting their tenderness but nothing jagged; in the lungs is London's turgid smokes and nothing more; the blood he tastes wells merely from a bitten tongue. He touches it gingerly. "We'll need to work on your subtlety, love. You've been spending too much time with my brother."

* * *

There is a small sporting pub just off Whitechapel High Street which in its back rooms welcomes many a club meeting, and whose walls have in their recent pasts born witness to several a rather distinguished literary gathering. Today, they must content themselves with the criminal underworld's weary cast-offs, toasting their own triumph with that preemptive self-congratulations which can be found in all inferiors.

The guard he kills quietly, with the knife in his sleeve.

He enters with unassuming nonchalance, as any dead man should stroll once raised from his grave. To puff up one's feathers and enter with fanfare- no, no; rather, give them a moment to look, to look again, to whisper to themselves, to feel Premonition with wary exhale frost the bristling neck.

Moran has frozen mid-drink.

He smiles from the doorway at the four men seated round their table. "Please, continue," he says graciously. "You appear to be celebrating."

From an inner pocket he slips another knife, and rifling it into the hand Moran darts toward his own weapon, leaves him screaming in his chair; the man to his left he slams face first into the table, hard enough to break his nose.

The other two are slow, cumbersome, culled from the substandard stock round which Moran has been forced to root in search of a traitor. One gets his third knife; the other he kicks from his chair and shoots where he lies.

The man lying in the pool from his nose is lifted by the nape of his neck, and dispensed with a slash to the throat. What suggestions those lurid penny dreadfuls may have planted in your head are wholly inaccurate; no man of mortal strength touches his knife to the buttery neck of his victim, and slices it with a breakfaster's drowsy ease.

He meets Moran's eyes as he saws through the man's throat, working the blade roughly, and flinging blood across the glasses abandoned half-drunk, smiling as the man's struggles begin to abate, and the body's instinctive twitches to reign.

"Now, mate," he says, holding up the knife to the light, and for a moment admiring it. He backhands Moran across the face, sailing him out of his chair and into the wall. "This is how you murder someone."

* * *

Elijah is somewhat resistant to the sitting room's newest acquisition.

"No," he says coldly, upon entering the room and spotting Moran's head on the mantelpiece. He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Niklaus. We've established very firm rules about severed heads in the house."

"I really think you're overreacting about this, brother. Just because of that one little incident with Bekah's second husband."

Elijah takes a bracing inhale. "No. Severed. Heads. In. The. House," he reiterates, and rings for one of the servants to carry it away.

No sense of showmanship, some people.

* * *

"Sure Wilkie Collins is the undisputed king, so. But Mrs. Braddon's had a fair swipe for the crown if you do be asking me," Tim says as they board one of the last omnibuses back to Baker Street, pulling his collar up round his chin to avoid those bits of wind which, carrying midnight already in their teeth, soften up a man for those fatal deeper hours.

"Not next to her," he says, and with a hand on his elbow turning Tim from the woman he has innocently directed himself toward, and drawing him instead into the private compartment. "She's a pickpocket."

"How can you tell?" Tim asks, looking with some betrayal at her demure gown, and the gloved hands folded with gentile refinement in the lap.

"You get to be able to spot them after enough times on one of these. That, and whatever her nice little dress may be desperately trying to project, no well-raised lady rides an omnibus unaccompanied at 11:30 in the evening. One of the hands in her lap is a false one, so she can sit there the very picture of irreproachable respectability, and grope about for unsuspecting purses with her free hand."

Tim transfers his wallet to an interior pocket of his jacket.

At Baker Street they scrape their boots on the railing, and tiptoe up the stairs past Mrs. Hudson's lair, from whence issues the dragon's low rumblings as it shifts on its cache of biscuits and Darjeeling, and through soft and satisfying dream chasing handsome tenants.

On the table has been deposited (amidst many other such detritus as Caroline never allows when she's home) a tray with only mildly stale biscuits, and a piece of folded notepaper.

"Hello; what's this?" he says, whisking off his jacket, and throwing it carelessly across the room, so that Tim may know where to place his own. "Caroline- come alone to Hyde Park, Knightsbridge side, 12:30. It's urgent." He flips it over; Tim leans across his shoulder to squint down at it. "No signature. That's rather ominous."

They exchange a look.

"I can't say we won't be horribly murdered, but shall we?"

Tim ponders this for a moment. "Sure it would be lovely not to have to report to the docks tomorrow morning."

They check their pockets for their pistols; Tim, being fresh from work, has only the one revolver, and a folding knife, rather insufficient for clandestine murder engagements, but that's easily remedied by any number of weapons he's stashed about the flat. "I've a smoke-rocket round here somewhere," he murmurs half to himself, upending the sofa cushions.

"A smoke-rocket?"

"Just your humdrum plumber's variety. I had a real bomb, but Caroline's touchy about explosives in the flat and made me get rid of it. Never take a woman as a roommate, Tim; they're very particular. Cramps your style, trust me. Ah; here we are," he exclaims, fishing out the rocket from beneath the sofa, and after a moment's triumphal posturing (it showcases his shoulders), tucking it into his vest.

* * *

Tonight a real pea-souper has got up; the cobblestones lie sick with jaundice underfoot, and challenge Tim for his traction, already in some difficulties thanks to the soles he's worn smooth on London's rougher alleyways. Somewhere a wind is moaning, but that doesn't concern the fog; not many worldly distresses concern a fog such as this. You could brandish a knife at it, and slice off not so much as a wisp. Having bricked off Cumberland gate behind them, and opening to every prowling thief these many side alleys by which rougher men make their way, it swallows their own legs to the knee, and with its best efforts tries to smudge out Tim's face, projecting nearly half a foot higher into the ether above them.

Hyde Park is during certain hours of the day bottlenecked with carriages along the north side of the Serpentine, ponderously ensuring this Season's hat is properly on display at a speed of Dead, Or Thereabouts; but at this hour the ladies have retired to their fires, and left the avenues to their dismal drownings.

It's precisely the sort of night on which Le Fanu would bump off his protagonist, but as he's far too handsome to worry about fate divesting itself of his facial structure, he keeps up a mild vigilance and nothing more; and anyway, they've linked arms upon leaving the flat and penetrating into this rather cunty night, and each has his hand on his gun.

At Knightsbridge a figure is hunched into himself, and has his face carefully slanted down, so the fog patters gently off his hat, and no gas light seeks underneath it; the man's of average height, broad-shouldered, and wearing an ulster, but if Caroline herself could make out anything else in this fog, he'll give his left testicle. (Well, not that one; it's his favourite. An Austrian count once gently slapped it.)

The man peeps out furtively from beneath his hat, and recoils; obviously a madman, to have reacted to the sight of his face in such a manner.

"You're not Caroline," he says, and steps away from the gate and a little farther into the alley, where his features begin to clear.

"Astute observation, darling. It's no wonder Scotland Yard constantly has to scrape and bow to a woman, if you're all so intellectually gifted."

Stefan Salvatore scowls at him from beneath the cap he now pulls lower over his eyebrows, as if in battening down his civilian dress, he might escape the disgrace of conversing with a sodomite in those obscene hours of night when everyone knows sodomy is most fervently commenced. (Assholes, darlings, are never as attractive by daylight.) "I need to speak with Caroline."

"I just so happen to live with her; I might be able to give her a message, in between soiling myself and talking to the wall, of course. I do have some small abilities; I've even dressed myself today."

Beside him, Tim is trying not to laugh. He isn't very good at it.

"I need to speak with _Caroline_ ," Stefan emphasizes. "I don't trust you."

"That's terribly hurtful." He hasn't let go of his pistol; you never know, after all, when you may have to shoot someone over a lapse in manners. Nik taught him that. "But you can talk to me, or you can piss off; it's your choice, darling. I happen to not trust men who arrange secret meetings in the dark with Caroline without even bothering to identify themselves beforehand. So: stalemate."

"It was too dangerous to identify myself in the note. I can't leave a trail."

"Good job you can just pass on your message to me, no paper trail required."

Stefan grabs his arm; he darts out his hand so swiftly that for a moment he nearly draws his pistol.

Tim does. "Don't touch him," he says, and with his free hand grasps Stefan by the wrist; quite bruisingly, it appears.

Stefan looks up at Tim in exasperation. "I'm a police officer. So you can shoot me, and go to Newgate, where you can take your chances on whether or not you'll get a fair trial as an Irish immigrant who's just murdered a Chief Inspector in cold blood."

"There's two of us, darling," he points out, and smiles just the way he's learned from Bekah, following a failure to remark upon her hair. "And it's awfully dark out here."

For a moment, Stefan waves his cock about, glaring up at them both, and then his arm is released, and Stefan shoves him backward; Tim, somewhat reluctantly, returns his revolver to his pocket.

"Tell Caroline I need to speak with her. Immediately. It's important. I'm not telling you any more than that," Stefan demands, and then abruptly turns his back on them both and strolls away down the avenue.

"What an arsehat," Tim says.

"A complete prat. Now, you'll want to run, darling; he's in a prickly enough mood that he may arrest us both for this," he replies, and, taking the smoke-rocket from his jacket, he pulls the caps, and tosses it at the back of Stefan's head.

* * *

Klaus is out all night, and returns early in the morning, cheerfully whistling.

She's arranging news clippings on the Whitechapel murders chronologically along the back wall; she's corrected all the erroneous 'facts' and crossed out the stupid sensationalism and to the margins added her own sprawling notations. Enzo is still sleeping, but with a start now jerks out of his dreams, as if sensing the presence of his nemesis. "I thought this shithole had just got a bit shittier. Touché, mate; you know how to make an entrance."

The smile instantly drops from Klaus' face.

He grabs at the blanket beneath Enzo and yanks it out from underneath him, nearly throwing Enzo onto the floor, and finding himself thwarted by Enzo's quicker hands, which grab the edge of the mattress and stop him just at that teetering moment between dignity and disgrace.

"In the year of our Lord 1888 He ascended from the ninth circle to rain fire and eight-year-old tantrums and it was terrible and the people were frightened. Seriously?"

The second she speaks, he's forgotten Enzo, he's forgotten the million waking breasts, taking their first startled lungfuls of September. For him London is this dim formless thing, somewhere beyond the window.

He smiles at her so she can't help but understand this.

Maybe somewhere, far buried, ancient, a thing in all humans that's been trained by its eons of genetics to stir, aching, and grope toward smiles such as these- maybe it squirms a little. Maybe for a moment she forgets he has blood on his shirt sleeve; she forgets, men come to him for the things they cannot stomach.

She tacks up her last clipping and she claps her hands and she says crisply to them both," Ok; time to get started for today."

* * *

But the rings are a dead end and the envelope with the two pills fruitless, and all through the day there trickles a steady stream of Baker Street Irregulars to report, "Noffink, ma'am".

She returns to a telegram from Kol.

 **Come home. Possible news.**

She crumples it in her hand, as if from exasperation, and draws on this weary sigh she has always at the ready. "I need to go home for a bit. I think there might be an emergency."

Enzo immediately snaps to attention. "Is this an all hands on deck situation? I've only one revolver on me."

"No, this is a Kol-related emergency. The usual, I think. I need to do a damage assessment. You can both stay here. And remember: big boys do not need twenty-four hour nannies to ensure they get along and don't stab each other in the face. If there's any blood on the floor when I come back," she says, and leaving this as a complete statement, slips out the door.

* * *

When she enters the apartment, she finds Kol and Tim bent over a navigational chart which they have spread over the table, jostling for elbow space and dramatically gesticulating with their pencils.

They look familiar; they touch along the hips and the shoulders with this casual intimacy that makes her pause for just a moment in the doorway to calculate their exact tuxedo sizes: blue waistcoats, she thinks. White will wash out Tim's complexion.

Kol flips a hand at her and Tim tips his hat but they do not look up; Tim taps the end of his pencil emphatically at something on the chart. Kol gives him a judgemental look. There's a round of elbow pokings while they sound off a stream of gibberings about someone called Morehouse and another referred to as 'Flood'.

And then Tim says, "The sounding rod near the pump indicates they may have thought she was going down and panicked. But would Briggs risk his daughter in that wee bit of skiff over that amount of water in the hold?" and she conjures up the most dramatic sigh anyone in the history of this world has ever uttered, and she says, "Nope nope nope; not _another_ one. Do not encourage him."

"Caroline's only jealous because my theories are better than hers."

She makes her way to the armchair he's misplaced, pinching the bridge of her nose along the way. "The _Mary Celeste's_ crew was not eaten by a kraken, they did not cannibalize one another, and an unknown voodoo talisman did not possess the captain and prompt him to murder everyone on board before he sacrificed him to the Shark King as penance."

Kol squints down at the chart, then over at Tim. "All their foul weather gear and belongings were left behind; there was only minor damage done to the sails to indicate a former brush with rough seas, nothing that suggested the ship wasn't at every point of the voyage completely seaworthy." He rubs the dimple in his chin thoughtfully, and then straightens, with the most deadpan look on his face. "Naturally, we can draw only one conclusion from this: evil mermaids."

She clasps her hands in her lap and glares at him. "Everything has a logical, scientific explanation to it; sometimes we just haven't discovered it."

"Then what is it?"

She steeples her fingers underneath her nose. "Why would experienced seaman panic at a perfectly seaworthy boat, so badly that they left behind all their worldly possessions, including what they'd need to survive in a tiny lifeboat, with not even the foul weather gear they'd need to protect them in the terrible storm average people like to posit is surely what drove them from it in the first place? Either there was a terrible, instant emergency, or…"

"They expected to come back," Tim answers.

She nods just slightly at him, keeping her fingers together.

"Perhaps the mermaids agreed to negotiate in the beginning."

" _No_!" she says, and she tries not to laugh, but it breaks out of her anyway, forcing her to heave the little throw pillow that's been wedged down the side of the chair in his direction.

He catches it, of course, and bows.

"Anyway, it's better than that _J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement_."

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what a load of piss," Tim says, and then, glancing over at her, "Sorry."

"It was published in _Cornhill_ , and still it's so firmly embedded itself into the lore I've seen some of the details sneak into 'historical' accounts. The gullibility of the public is truly unparalleled. The name of the ship isn't even correct."

"What's your news?" she cuts in. "And by the way? Don't think I didn't see that you put the couch back wrong."

"Tim bumped it."

"What? I did not," Tim insists, with a touch of panic in his voice.

"Messages are on the mantle," Kol tells her, throwing himself down onto the sofa, and hooking one of his legs casually over the arm.

"I saw. Apparently we need to review the rule about not stabbing the mail with a jackknife and leaving it embedded in the fireplace."

He does that oh-pish-tosh-I'm-too-handsome-to-care full bodied shrug with his arms out to either side, and leans his head back against the sofa arm. "I didn't want it to get lost. Anyway. Tim and I had a bit of an adventure last night."

"If this is a sex thing, I don't want to know," she points out, and exactly on cue, Tim turns the deepest shade of red every lone painter has ever struggled to channel from sunset into his brush.

" _Is_ it a sex thing?"

"Sadly, no. It's a Stefan Salvatore thing."

She sighs, heavily. "I have asked you and asked you to not antagonize him. He is my sole Scotland Yard contact who actually likes me, who _cooperates_ with me-"

"I don't trust him."

She cocks her head and gives him a little look. "You don't trust any police officer."

"I don't trust any self-righteous man. Any man who hasn't the audacity to own his sins commits the worst of them."

"Very philosophical. Anyway, exactly what has Stefan done now? Confiscated your opium? Reminded you that public sodomy is a charge Elijah can wriggle you out of only so many times?"

He extends a piece of folded paper to her, and, sitting up, watches her with unnerving steadiness as she peruses it for a moment and then, re-creasing it, taps it against her chin. "Stefan was waiting for us at Hyde Park, and he was quite reticent. He refused to tell me anything. He said he'd information for you alone and that he couldn't risk leaving a paper trail, nor could he pass a message through me. You're supposed to contact him unobtrusively."

She taps the paper once more, one measured _plap_ of its edge against her jaw. "And?"

Tim fidgets. He's leaned his hip against the table and crossed his arms over his chest, with the hat pulled a little lower over his eyes, so neither lash nor tell is visible.

She cuts him a sideways look.

Some take longer to break than others, but the steepled fingers, the long and unwavering skimming of the eyes over every facial tic- all of these combined unravel every client, enemy, pedestrian, if you can see down to all the faded dust of them, where they've swept things even they cannot remember, they'll yield up everything they have, always.

"We threw a smoke rocket at his head," Tim blurts out. "And...I pulled a gun on him."

Kol shrugs.

She pinches the bridge of her nose.

"Ok; here's what I'm going to do. Stefan is my friend. But because I love you more, I will graciously not kill you. You will return the couch to its rightful position. You will thoroughly clean off the table. You will fix the hole you've made in the mantle. You will _not_ ," she looks severely at them both, "consummate your obviously blossoming love anywhere other than Kol's room. Understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," Tim says.

Kol grabs her arm as she stands to leave, and for a moment looks up with this sincerity she sees in him just rarely, just for her. "Be careful, Caroline."

* * *

"What sort of moral objection does your good Catholic soul have to stalking?" he asks Tim as soon as her footsteps have faded down the stairs, and across the foyer, where they are embraced at once by Baker Street's evening traffic. It wouldn't do to open this discussion while she's still in the house; she's exceptional hearing.

"Stefan?"

"Yes."

"Me good Catholic soul will manage just grand."

* * *

 _In lesser stories, there is the tendency to introduce an integral element in the eleventh hour. The author, wracking his feeble brains to the last chapter, where he must at last bring his darlings to fruition, finds there the sharp vicissitude of the mediocre talent, who has spent all his genius in that enthusiastic gush of the beginning. With back to that unforgiving wall, then, with his deadline and his word count dwindling, he panics, he flails about: he plucks the first contrivance to spring to his mind, no matter how few pen strokes he has earlier devoted to it. And we his floundering audience are left marooned in our own confusion, staring about miserably at this morass we have blundered into, and wondering, is it for our own lack of cleverness, or his?_

 _A word, therefore, fair reader, on Stefan Salvatore._

 _Youngest son to Giuseppe Salvatore, a profitable Italian immigrant who, upon the loss of his wife, moved his two small sons to the rainy climes of England where he might bury his grief in that most welcoming bosom of unfamiliarity. Of the elder son little is known; a restless traveler, we may presume from passenger lists, and the holder of some small debts accrued over cards, and swiftly settled by his father._

 _The Salvatores are of that common stock that neither sinks to man's lowest depths or ascends to his loftiest heights, but instead floats in between. No fair hand will grasp after their titles, but each brother has in his monthly allowance that privilege of the contentedly rich, who can marinate on his estate, and marry neither for love nor money if he so prefers, and instead devote himself to his fishing rod._

 _Stefan Salvatore, then, is that rare breed of man who takes up his truncheon not in want of his daily bread, but in noble support of that concept man, if the papers are to be believed, buries ever deeper beneath his mosses with every trundling year: Justice, that first flickering seedling mankind snuffs when he has shed his plump swaddling days and finds himself thrown unceremoniously into bleak and breadless adulthood._

 _His promotions are not ill-gotten, and so unworthy of mention; no, Salvatore has in his official records no ignoble strike against his good if foreign name. It is enough to say that in the fall of 1885 he made Chief Inspector and then subsided once more into the Metropolitan force with nary a ripple. Good men rarely stir those undulations which originate from no solo stone, chastely dropped into the rushes where the surface is already broken._

 _It was soon after this appointment that his acquaintance with Caroline Forbes began, and put him onto that lucky trajectory which necessitates his appearance in these pages. Of romantic inclinations there is no particular proof; be they well-hidden or be his heart merely a larger recipient than that of his colleagues who shut their ranks against a simple woman, nevertheless, not once did Stefan begrudge Caroline her expertise, nor fail in the respectful usage of it whenever necessary. An unwatered bloom answers to any small droplet, be it poison or paradise: and so when Lestrade has thrown up his usual official barricade, it is to Stefan she turns, safe in his gracious conduct, and it is why at a dismal hour on the night of September 27, 1888, she goes alone to meet him in one of Spitalfield's dodgiest public houses and listens with bright and trusting eyes to his tale of whispered woe._

 _There is one failing in Caroline Forbes. Though she casts a studious eye over every bare thread and ruffled hair, and in a moment's acquaintance has them neatly sussed down to the owner's rough childhood in Liverpool, she throws herself faithfully and whole-heartedly into that confidence only the religious, in his most comfortable hour, with God's creations shining all around him, can ever experience. She has never laid her heart at the feet of golden idols; but she has set it before every friend in all its raw and childlike wonder._

 _And so, if one is close enough, and bends his ear hard enough, he can pick out in those furtive murmurings the salacious report of a police conspiracy arrayed against all the dastardly turns of Whitechapel, and the murderer who stalks them._

 _He can see, if he has got the lay of her, and knows the turnings of her mind and loyalty, that she has no need to question this testimony, to check his fingernails, to lift up his boots, to note the nick on his inner shirt sleeve: so hath Friend spoken, and so hath his Word been inscribed._

* * *

 **Bekah will be putting in an appearance; no worries. I just got distracted by Klaus murdering people and Kol and Tim seriously contemplating killing Stefan and dumping his body somewhere in the park.**


	4. Part Four

**A/N: Welcome to what is probably the penultimate update; the end is in sight, it just depends upon how long I digress on my way to it. If the next part ends up being lengthy in an unholy sort of way, then I'll split it into two; if it's around the same size as the rest of the chapters, I'll post it as one.**

 **Some notes:**

 **The 'very black, indeed, more like a distillation of mud than anything else' quote is from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The English Notebooks'. Kol's recounting of his first meeting with Caroline is lifted fairly verbatim from Sherlock and Watson's first meeting in 'A Study in Scarlet', though I've adjusted some of the dialogue, and Watson, in the original, wasn't a medical student at the laboratory; he was taken to meet Sherlock by an acquaintance.**

 **All descriptions of the murders are taken directly from coroner and police reports.**

 **Holywell Street doesn't exist anymore, but at the time it was a bastion for, well, a lot of porn. And the guy wiggling his fingers at them? He is cruising for gay sex in one of the spots suggested by a travel guide called 'Yokel's Perceptor' which ostensibly was a guide written to advise country rednecks how to be streetwise, but actually gave tips on where to go for some sweet, sweet gay loving. Because the Victorians were just as sex-craved as us, they just had to be more low-key about it.**

 **Toby is not a St. Bernard in the original stories, but I've changed him in this to give my parents' St. Bernard a guest star appearance. And, yes, he is just as cowardly. The real Toby is called Ben, and he is available for pets Mon-Sun from about 3:00 in the morning to any time that is not at all convenient to you, because you were born into this world to pay attention to him and it doesn't matter what your schedule is, you're on his time now.**

* * *

At 1:10 a.m. on the morning of September 30th, she comes to in the soft lost hours between midnight and six.

For a moment she lies in her bed feeling herself snowed in by the moonlight.

There is no more charming sleep than an interrupted one; O sly Lethe, what crafty ambrosia you wield in those misty depths, she thinks, and then: what kind of pretentious Klausian _nonsense_?

She shoots upright beneath her blanket.

Stagnant London peeks one tremulous eye into the window over her head; in these early hours of the morning the streets are more fog than gas lamp; the battle has been duly mounted, but technology has always been the feeble plaything of fickle Mother Nature.

Klaus and Enzo are huddled together on the bed; Enzo has tossed one arm over Klaus' waist in his nocturnal thrashings; Klaus is absolutely dead out, his curls strewn over the pillow they have in that mutual truce of exhaustion opted to share.

Klaus is drooling onto Enzo's cheek.

She strips the blanket carefully off her and lowers her feet to the floor.

She picks up the cane beside her cot.

In the corridor outside is some hushed murmuring of common drama; Mr. Collins has separated from his wife again. Her sleep is carefully regimented; unbroken four hour blocks that spring her bright-cheeked from her bed just as Kol is stumbling into his. She wakes for no stupid domestic fuss, which, by the _way_ , Mr. Collins, might be readily fixed by a little not being quite so free with the trouser parts.

This is something else.

She tightens her hand around the cane.

The men sleep uselessly on.

There is one brief flicker by the window, this faint glimmer of light, sensation, movement, and she turns, she leans the cane back against the wall beside her cot, and kneeling now on the cot, wrestles the ancient hatches from their frozen sleep.

"Miss Forbes!" Charlie whispers, sticking his head through the open window and at last rousing Klaus, who starts out of his sleep explosively, throwing the blanket off himself and Enzo.

She eyes him pointedly.

"There's no fireplace in here!" he snaps, and finding Enzo now blinking sleepily up at him, pushes him out of bed.

"You can shove me out of your bed, mate, but you can never oust me from your heart."

"What is it, Charlie?" she asks before Klaus' indignant spluttering can drown out anything actually useful she might get out of this interaction.

"There's an awful fuss round Berner Street, near the club there. The one wit' all the Jews. I's couldn't see much, mum. But I fink there's another body, what like the others."

"The club with all the Jews- do you mean the International Working Men's Educational Club? 40 Berner Street?"

"That's the one!"

She takes two shillings from her pocket and hands them through the window to the outstretched hand. "Great work!" she says, beaming down onto the boy's grubby little face. "You two!" she calls over her shoulder. "Pants. Now."

* * *

At the hour of one, in the wretched parish of St George-in-the-East, some malcontent god has spilled his ink all over the boulevards; he has tried to blot them from existence. Any native stroller who has for three decades parsed these wretched streets may be forgiven for pausing in his travels, and striving with that small and persistent panic of the drowning man to orient himself; his landmarks have ceded to some foul sorcery; what daylight has rendered as harmless brick and innocent dusts this evil morning now perverts. Time and all its mundane ravages are here transformed: as if in bypassing these streets with her rococo flourishes, Mother Nature has turned her back completely.

But Caroline, showing hardly less familiarity with these narrow back streets than he, leads them at a brisk clip; the shoulders are firmly set. She has let down the curls, and in trousers moves with a confidence most men are hard-pressed to conjure in their lighted parlours. She takes them past the new London School Board building, through the gates of Dutfield's Yard, and with one hand, which she at times lifts in anticipation of some 'witticism' or another of Enzo's, reminds them genius must have its silence: to jar it from its revolutions before its observations have fully crystallized is worse than a crime.

To the right as they enter the courtyard beyond the gates: The International Working Club for which they are bound. On the left, by no. 42: a row of cottages. A sack manufactory and disused stable complete the general surroundings in which this latest atrocity has been committed and in which she must work; she has taken these in at a glance and already in a brief pass discerned what must be perused with the glass, and what tossed aside.

Here what authorial deletions your fickle Creator has attempted to make are feebly combated by the light from the gas jets in the club's kitchen; through the side door they introduce into the yard a few haphazard strips of gold, and the cottages, taking up their cause, splash a few more from their windows.

But this gloom is nigh impenetrable; in its depths teem all manner of myths. In darkness there is a supreme possibility: every creature which sunlight banishes from the rational mind is posted with a madman's howl in each black corner.

Between the gates and the side door of the club, there is a constable hovering over a dark heap with his lantern, who with tremulous voice occasionally entreats the crowd drawn by this newest tragedy to keep back. They have arrived too late to make the first unspoiled examination of the victim: a man with medical bag in hand is just now crouching over this lifeless mass which from here is little more than a bundle of cloth.

By the light of the lantern, he can make out a dark stream near the constable's feet.

Caroline rudely introduces herself into the crowd by prodigious use of her elbows.

"Oh, no- not you," the constable says as she kneels beside the good doctor and his bag, rolling up her sleeves.

"I'm an independent consultant on this case. Inspector Lestrade himself ordered me to make my observations and report back to him with my findings." And taking a pen from the pocket of her coat, she gingerly lifts the woman's wrist as both men look with horror upon this impudent interloper.

"Miss Forbes," the constable says, drawing himself to full height, and grabbing her arm somewhat roughly. "If Inspector Lestrade's said anything of the sort, there'll be a row. I've had me orders so I have, and from far higher up than your Inspector Lestrade. You're not to interfere with this investigation. Please step back with the crowd there and let the examiner do his duty, miss."

"Ok, well, I'm pretty sure he can do his job just fine- _excuse_ you!" she snaps as the constable gives a yank that puts her once more on her feet, and now Enzo, like any good dog who has perceived in every stray threat some risk to his master, grabs the collar of his uniform.

"Your orders notwithstanding, mate, don't lay a finger on her."

He steps smoothly forward to rescue the situation. "PC Lamb, isn't it?"

"Mr. Mikaelson! I'd have not thought to see the likes of you in this dismal place, at such an hour, sir."

Caroline rolls her eyes.

He ignores her. "Miss Forbes is accompanying me on one of my early morning strolls. It's something I like to do occasionally, in the more downtrodden districts; if we do not know our most misfortunate, if we have not seen where they break their bread, and send their children to beg, how can we possibly help them?"

"Very kind of you, I'm sure, sir. But I beg your pardon; I've strict orders that Miss Forbes is not to interfere in this investigation any longer. I'd risk the sack, sir."

He does not look at Caroline; the hands he clasps behind his back are signal enough that he intends to remain here for some interval, spinning his honeyed anecdotes. The average intellect is in no great hurry to interrupt his betters, though they while away half his day, and steer him from his tasks; he has nothing beyond the painful buzzing in his head, which occasionally manifests in what he no doubt deems to be a thought; and if some connoisseur, through some passing kindness, decides to add here and there a master stroke to his painful scribblings, what right has he to deny this artful spicing of his limited understanding?

"And we wouldn't want that, now would we, mate? It's perfectly understandable; though you have lost a valuable resource in denying Miss Forbes her skills, Scotland Yard, of course, has its reasons. However, I might be able to offer my assistance. I frequent many of the workhouses; I've talked with many of these women. If you allow me a closer look, I might be able to identify her."

Caroline has casually stepped round to the side of the doctor while he graces the constable with his dimples. Not too much; the proper gravity must be affected, of course, the appropriate grief injected into this gentle commiseration: you must open to him all the malice of humanity, and your tired resignation in accepting it.

PC Lamb is, of course, charmed.

Caroline, standing with hands folded in front of her as any good, non-dissenting citizen, flits her eyes over every detail of the scene which PC Lamb's lantern throws its insufficient strip across.

For a moment she meets his eyes, and with a nearly imperceptible movement of her head, indicates the wall to the left of the woman.

He shifts himself slightly, directing the constable, without alerting PC Lamb's natural suspicion in the least, to unconsciously mirror this movement, and so tilt his lantern in the direction Caroline needs.

"I suppose it oughtn't hurt to let you have a peep at the poor woman," PC Lamb agrees amiably enough, and apologizing to the doctor, redirects the lantern for a moment over the woman's face.

The features are oddly at peace; she has died with her mouth partially open. Round the neck there is a check silk scarf, the bow turned to the left and pulled quite tight; below this can be seen the frayed border of the scarf, and the incision which has been drawn along the skin beneath it. She is unfamiliar to him; a street walker or washer woman of minuscule significance to this uninterested parish, which has got its hands full juggling the Jews and their myriad discriminations. There is an utmost peace about this huddled form, which appears as if some benevolent power has laid it gently into the wheel rut in which her head rests, and having seen her off to that Elysian field, continues its reapings elsewhere.

"Actually," Caroline says, and lays a shaky hand on his arm. "I'm starting to feel a bit lightheaded. It's the blood. I can distract myself from it when I'm thinking; but if they're not going to let me help them, I need to leave."

"Of course, love," he replies softly, and like any good gentleman, draws her arm through his. "It's my greatest regret that I have no answers for you, constable. I'm afraid I've never seen the woman before. I'd better see Miss Forbes off. Good luck; may you catch this abominable monster."

Enzo trails them as they circumvent the whispering crowd; they are only just out of view of the yard when Caroline wrenches her arm from his and says with perfect steadiness, "'Abominable monster' was a compliment, I assume."

"Of course not. I have no kind words for anyone who stalks my city without even bothering to pay his respects to its sadly underappreciated king."

"Ok, now I am going to vomit."

He smiles. "Which direction, sweetheart?"

"Toward Aldgate. And don't call me that. No weapon; nothing this time to indicate anything about the murderer. He would have been hurrying, he didn't drop anything at Dutfield's, but he's flustered now; quickly. And _look_ at everything we pass."

"Pardon me, Gorgeous, I don't mean to interrupt, but a hint for those of us who can't isolate fluorine in our sleep."

"Sorry," she says with obvious remorse, as if it's any concern whether or not he feels himself a part of this, and hooks her arm through Enzo's. "There weren't any mutilations; he must have been interrupted. Which means he's angry, he's frustrated- he didn't get what he wanted. He's about to murder someone else. He may already have. We need to be quick. He'll have snatched the first prostitute who presents a nice target, which is pretty much all of them. The club was the more dangerous of the locations; even at that hour, people are coming and going; there was probably a meeting still on while he was killing her. Everything from here on out is pretty much deserted at this hour, except for a few clients, a few street walkers, and him."

"We can safely surmise he is not a member of the club, though the police will waste their time investigating that avenue anyway."

"Obviously. Any frequenter of that club would know its members are constantly coming and going, even at an hour like that. He must have seen how dark the yard was and determined it would be a good place to bring her. I think we can fairly comfortably decide he isn't a Jew either, no matter how much the general public would like that."

"Or at least not a Socialist Jew," he replies, and in his chest there is that brief satisfactory pang of an orator before his common listeners as Enzo, in endeavoring to pick up even the simplest thread in this rapid flurry, and to follow it to some erroneous conclusion, turns from Caroline to him, blinking his vacant eyes.

And here they penetrate once more into the long unloved boulevards, where the yellow mists wander aimlessly, in search of some phantom conductor. Here, the warbling of their voices land as might strange feet on foreign shores; there is an ultimate courage in pressing forward into these nebulous spaces where the rational mind is once more usurped: no mere steadiness of nerves, no, let them jangle as they wish, and fix with shaking hand the bayonet to woo immortal Death.

Caroline does not relinquish Enzo's arm; but neither does she lean on it.

Some faint instinct turns her this way, that; with bouncing curls she leads them if not fearlessly at least steadfastly into the gathering fogs, which sniff in lone curiosity round their pattering heels.

"Klaus," she whispers.

If there is in all humans a dim sixth sense handed down by his flat-browed ancestors, in their minds percolates something plucked from those all-seeing scribes of Olympus' vaporous peaks. Jupiter never cast so long an eye over his oft-adopted shores.

She has let go of Enzo's arm.

There passes between he and Caroline a look indefinable by any plain dictionary of ordinary tongues.

He slips his pistol from an inner pocket of his jacket; Enzo with hound-like compliance takes out his own. For a moment he graciously ignores Enzo's conventional stupidity: he does possess some small talents in marksmanship.

But no sooner has the less extraordinary of them girded his loins, and prepared to rush with bristling spine in defense of his master, Caroline says in her normal voice, "You can put your guns away," and taking from her jacket a small pocket lantern, shines it over the cobblestones into the southwest corner of Mitre Square. "We're too late."

* * *

For a moment she could scream.

But the woman's heart has only just finished its final struggle beneath the pale skin of her wrist, and the blood before which Klaus somewhat reverently kneels, like an immense creeper, warms the tips of her trembling fingers.

"Do you want me to nip over and get Tim out of bed? His flat's only a few minutes from here. Between the three of us we might-"

"No," she interrupts Enzo. "Tim won't be home. No-" And now she starts abruptly rifling through her pockets, flinging out all her money, pursuing into every little dark corner all the coins and notes she has folded into her clothes and pushing them into Enzo's own startled hands. "We won't catch him that way. He's already gone through the passages; there are a million of them. No- Mr. Sherman is just back from his trip abroad. Get the nearest cab. I have five pounds here. Tell the driver he can have _all_ of it if he gets you to Mr. Sherman's flat within ten minutes, and back here in half an hour. _Run_."

She presses the last of her shillings into his chest, and, tipping his hat, Enzo takes off at a dead sprint across Aldgate.

There is a moment of silence; she supposes she ought to be grateful for even that. "Well, it looks as if she's quite _cut up_ over-"

" _No_!" she snaps, stabbing a finger at him. "She is dead. You can have some respect for that. Now, make yourself useful and help me search everything within a two hundred foot radius before Scotland Yard comes along to stomp its big, incompetent boots all over everything."

* * *

"A little to the left. Right; hold there, darling."

"I don't see why I couldn't sit on _your_ shoulders."

"Because you're five inches taller and twenty pounds heavier."

"Me neck would appreciate a right word with that 'twenty pounds heavier' claim, you gobdaw."

"Shh! I'm trying to concentrate," he says, and thumps Tim soundly in the shoulder with his heel. "She's whinging about a stolen necklace; I can't read his lips, he's turned away just enough. She thinks one of the servants may have taken it. Seems a bit mundane for our friend Stefan, doesn't it? He could have sent a constable round to take a report. Maybe he's knocking her."

"Sure you're allowed to talk and I'm to stand here suffering in silence while you choke the wind out of me with your thighs? Would you let up, ye fumbling eejit? I'm not about to lose the Derby."

"Out of consideration for your shy and retiring constitution, I won't offer a single comment on all the innuendo open to me in regards to my thighs around your neck. I want you to remember this gentlemanly moment."

"I've set aside a whole notebook for the documentation of all your gentlemanly moments. Don't worry; it's entirely blank, so I've plenty of room for a brief dash: 'Today the lad passed up an opportunity to allude to all his illegal proclivities. Must inform the papers.'"

"Will you have it notarized?"

"Sure so it's not just me own two eyes sees the greatest plot twist of our fine century."

"She's still on about the necklace. He's taking notes and attempting to seem fascinated."

"If you haven't copped to anything useful in thirty seconds, I'm throwing you into these hedges."

"Good, good; and then slap me around a bit. And stop laughing; he'll hear you."

"He hasn't heard a word of your gibbering but he'll catch me out at having a quiet snicker to meself-"

"He's turning round."

Tim throws him into the hedges and flings himself afterward.

They lie with their hearts in their ears at the feet of Mrs. Forstye's rose bushes, his nose smashed into Tim's collar. They peer at one another through the dead leaves autumn has gathered up in blasé fistfuls, and deposited with no earthly care for the aesthetic of London's moneyed suburbanites.

Tim is struck by the absurdity of this, and assaulted by one of those fits of laughter that complicate a man's most solemn moments. He bites his fist.

The servants' entrance opens on well-oiled hinges to expel Stefan, who is in the midst of reassuring Mrs. Forstye of his absolute commitment to the 'swift elucidation of her terrible misfortune'. He puts his lips directly against Tim's ear. "'Elucidation': did Caroline use that in a sentence for you, darling?'"

Tim kicks him.

Neither Mrs. Forstye nor her strapping detective stir from their tense consultation; Mrs. Forstye is insistent upon the detainment of the entire household; Stefan steers her carefully toward less invasive solutions.

The wind at last settles the matter, having worked up enough righteous fury to disturb Mrs. Forstye's hair; she bids Stefan curt farewell, and retreats inside.

Stefan tucks his notebook into a pocket and strolls back through the gate and toward the dark boulevard, where a few gas lamps wage their feeble war against mother nature's tantrum.

"Since we're here anyway: how about an illicit snog in the bushes?" he asks once Stefan is out of earshot.

"Absolutely not," Tim replies with full injured dignity. "I'm a nice girl."

"Ah, you want to be wooed."

"A little."

They smile at one another.

"Stalk him for another hour and then tea?"

"Half an hour. This fecking fog would freeze the balls off a brass monkey."

* * *

They work swiftly, by the light of her pocket lantern. There are no stray footfalls somewhere in the distance to stir these marble catacombs; where there should be some far semblance of existence, there is only the fog, and Klaus' breathing.

There are the two insufficient street lamps, brooding down on Mitre Square; there are those.

She has to focus on the woman, on all her human minutiae and the hand that ended them, but in her peripheral vision she keeps this minor aureole, so that somewhere beyond the woman's eyes there is this waiting warmth, where humankind has carried on as usual.

Klaus crouches on the other side of the body, hands folded between his knees.

He is absolutely still.

She can see, when she looks up from the woman's throat, some monumental turning behind his eyes; there's this utmost quiet about him, not just an internal thing, a centering, but something that snuffs all external attempts at sound, and throws them, awestruck, to their knees before this coming revelation. All the ghosts that ever came before, and haunt now their former roosts, gather with chins in their hands.

For a moment she wants to know: is this what the boys see when she's puzzling some impossible conundrum?

She touches the woman's left wrist, lightly.

"What time is it?"

He takes out a pocket watch and swiftly the lid flickers in his long white fingers. "1.41."

"There's an officer that walks this beat; we'll need to be quick."

"I can take care of any necessary distractions."

"You _can't_ kill him."

"'Can't' and 'won't' are two very different things, love. But don't worry; I do have other methods at my disposal. Now, how about you throw a bit of illumination on something for me, hmm? What sort of dust-up did you and Scotland Yard get into?"

"We didn't."

"Tch, tch. If you don't trust me, I can't help you."

"Yeah, you should know, just so we're both on the same foot here, I will _never_ trust you. That's how people die."

"Many a man has perished who wouldn't trust me as far as he can throw me."

"Ok, see, all your allusions to being a mass murderer don't exactly incline me to trust you even _more_. Just so you know."

"Caroline," he says, with that emphatic little press on the last syllable, as if in rolling its flavor around in his mouth he has finally distinguished something unknown; not a name, no, he says it not like any mundane identification, but as if in uttering it he's peeling back the human flesh of her to show her something she never noticed.

She would never say this. It never leaves here.

But there's something between them.

She doesn't want to assign too much to it. But she feels it in a way that scares her. She could wade ten thousand depthless fogs and their lurking cadavers; she can't face this.

But she looks at the woman's throat, still cooling, and the up flung skirts, and his hands between his knees, and the bits of charcoal on the thumbnails.

She wets her lips.

"I have a contact at Scotland Yard who actually cooperates with me from time to time."

"Stefan Salvatore."

"I'm not even going to bother asking how you know that. Yes, Stefan. He sent me a message the other night; he had something important to discuss. He said he couldn't go into details, but there's a police conspiracy surrounding this case."

"And you have reason to believe him."

"The fiber I found in the yard where we examined Annie Chapman's body; it belongs to a police uniform." She watches him watching her; his expression doesn't change. "You already knew this."

Now he smiles.

"You're gross. Stop stalking me. Write this down."

"You don't keep it all in your head?"

"I can. But thoughts are sometimes clearer in another medium; something jumps out at you that didn't before. The same way you can view a handwritten page eight hundred times and always miss the same mistake, and then immediately spot it after it's been taken to the printers. So. Head nearly severed. Knife was inserted just under the left eye, then taken under the nose. Gash down the right cheek in alignment with the jawbone. Nose laid across on the cheek." She pauses for a moment. "I wish Kol were here."

"You know, I have some small anatomical knowledge that might be put to good use."

"I'm sure you do."

"Why is it you trust my brother more than me? You're aware, I'm sure, that he's no squeamish stranger to some of the attributes you so abhor in me."

"Kol has a good heart."

"No, not anymore; he doesn't keep hold of those for long. They're tasty."

"Very clever."

"I know; that's why I said it."

"Can we please concentrate on this poor dead lady? Head, eighteen inches from the wall and railings closing off the yard of Heydemann's. Feet are pointed toward the carriageway heading out of Mitre Street. Coal plate to the left of her head. Grating to the left of her legs, leading into a cellar in an empty house. Back wall of the house is parallel with the body. This is the darkest corner of the square; it's exactly the sort of spot a prostitute would bring her client. She wasn't dragged here by force. The lamp-post is sixty-five feet away; this corner would have been dark even after lighting-up. Intestines lifted out and placed over her right shoulder. One detached portion two feet in length between the body and left arm. Head turned to the left shoulder. Arms have fallen by her sides. Palms upward. A thimble is just off the right finger. Clothes above the abdomen; abdomen exposed, right leg bent at the thigh and knee. A large puddle of clotted blood on the left side of the neck, and around the shoulder and upper arm, plus blood under the neck and right shoulder. Small mustard tin with two pawn tickets."

"Sounds as if our intrepid constable is approaching."

"Do _not_ kill him."

"Relax, sweetheart. I think one of us at least is sick to _death_ of all this senseless killing," he says, and with a ridiculously pleased smile, melts away into the mists.

* * *

Her watch reads 1:49.

Klaus has long since vanished into the fog.

There are only her and the woman, staring at one another. The fog does not move; in it there is some shapeless cohesion, an inhuman flesh. You can see where it flinches back from the moon, from the streetlamps, from all the living world that wants to banish it.

She hears nothing.

No: she never hears nothing. Some people, some ears: they hear nothing. There is a tiny movement in everything, all these clandestine breathings that tell her when and by what means the world whiles away its infinite clocks.

He will come swiftly out of the fog, cat-like; there is no use in listening for his returning footsteps. She does listen for the constable; she does send all her senses back along the alleys, back toward Aldgate, toward St. George-in-the-East, where at some unknown minute Enzo will alight from his cab, and bring the dog on foot.

She crouches on her heels, palms together, pointer fingers against her nose.

And beside the woman now, with her feet pointed in the same direction, with her head cocked at that precise angle, her arms limply unresistant. She never struggled; she did not pierce this world with one last defiance. She was probably resigned. Her life was this one long stumbling from one poverty to the next, where no one really lives, but simply exists. You can never get by on that. You can never work fourteen hours for a shilling, and stagger home at dawn, and see in your fellow man a common mirror. Maybe the dogs: maybe the dogs have between the two of you some universal ground to range, baying after the humans and their purses.

Klaus appears first. He doesn't seem to walk; the fog thickens, darkens, spits out a man-shaped silhouette.

"Is the constable all right?" she asks, bringing her hands up, prayer-like, to cup her nose.

"I didn't kill him," Klaus assures her, which is such a deft little sidestepping of her question; she narrows her eyes at him.

And then finally, from the direction of Aldgate, she hears first the uneven gate, the susurration of the right arm along the trousers; and after, this soft pat patting of the galloping paws across the damp cobblestones.

She opens her eyes, and rolls swiftly to one side.

With a small knife, she cuts a piece from the woman's hem, careful not to touch the bare knee underneath it.

"What have you not got on you?" Klaus asks her, and then Enzo emerges from the mists, merrily pulled along by what at first glance appears to be a shaggy Holstein, and at second is proved to be an enormous St. Bernard.

"Toby!" she calls. "Good boy!"

The leash is jerked from Enzo's hand; he stumbles forward, catches himself, raises his hands in nonchalant concession to what comes next.

To her immense irritation, Toby completely bypasses her; he leaps like some kind of long-lost lover into Klaus' arms.

"Hello, mate. What a handsome lad we are, yes?"

"Don't baby talk him," she demands. "He's working."

Klaus gathers up big fistfuls of the quivering jowls and rubs them with such complete abandonment of his evil swagger that it pisses her off; you cannot just…take a holiday from ruling hell. It confuses people. "Are we going to track the way she's come?" Enzo asks breathlessly, leaning on his knees, and with his chin indicating the square the woman crossed with her final client.

"No," she says, and now calling out firmly, "Toby!" she holds out the piece of skirt in her hand. "It's hard to tell, thanks to all the bodily fluids. But he was wearing some sort of cologne. When he pulled up her skirts, it transferred onto them. If anybody can track it down, it's Toby. Here, boy! Come here! Smell it, Toby! There's a good boy!"

And now, having gotten his attention, she tosses the piece of skirt away from her, and catching up his leash as he trots past to thoroughly investigate it, waits for a moment with her heart in her throat to see, will he paw it indifferently aside-

But the massive head jerks up.

And then plunging his nose once more into the cobblestones, he lunges forward with her sprinting along afterward, and the boys in hot pursuit.

* * *

Stefan proves boring prey; after forty minutes muddling about in the fog, they return to the Baker St. lodgings where Tim installs himself at the window with a cigarette, and he puts the kettle on.

The mist, introducing itself through the crack by which Tim smokes in uneasy fear of sullying the walls with his cheap tobacco, and setting upon himself all the hounds of Caroline, prods with bitter finger at the fireplace, and judging it unconquerable, sulks back to its overwhelmed gas lights.

While the water boils, he clears himself proper brooding space at table and commences his thinking. He tries infrequently to attempt it; as Rebekah might point out, it's very bad for one's skin. It's all right for Elijah, who has only marginally lived, and the rest of the time contented himself to sit in his library, arguing Aristotle, and there resigned himself to resemble something like an old shoe within the next decade.

But when you've a face like this.

He puts his feet up on the table; it helps him concentrate, to know somewhere she senses this violation, and in great indignation takes it out on his brother.

"So will you be telling me why you've such a loathing for your man up in Scotland Yard?" Tim asks, blowing a thin stream of smoke from his nose and out over the street. "Did he arrest you?"

"No; that never bothers me. The arrests never stick, anyway. I have a brother in Parliament."

"Is it a lover's spat?" Tim asks next, and pretends to not be particularly invested in the answer.

"I have much better taste than that. No; it has nothing particularly to do with any relations between us. He treats Caroline like something to be used, which makes him no different than any of the rest of Scotland Yard, who are happy to bang their chests till another criminal's outsmarted them and it's time to grudgingly slink round to her doorstep. But Lestrade at least is barely civil; neither he nor Caroline have any illusions that anything other than professional necessity has brought them together. Stefan, on the other hand, plays at being her friend. And she doesn't have enough of those. So she embraces him wholeheartedly, while he dodges her visiting card, and then makes nice at the station when he's a case that's over his head."

Tim sits silently for a moment, blowing another cloud of smoke over Baker Street, where it will be summarily taken up, and patched into this woolly cast-off of the clouds.

"Don't look at me like that."

"Sure I'm not even looking at you at all," Tim protests, holding his hands out to either side while the cigarette sags, sputtering, from his lips. "Only you're a soft little bastard, you puffed-up eejit."

"Don't say that. It's offensive to my people."

Tim laughs. "How many of them have you got?"

"One for each man I've killed."

"Oh, he's after trying to prove himself now, is he? 'I'll kill a man right now, darling; I'll kill a _baby_ ,' he says. You can't take it back now; I'm sorry. It's too late. You've been found out, so you have. There's a wee bit of conscience somewhere after all."

"No there isn't."

Tim can look very smug when he wishes to; it's an aggravating side-effect of an addled tongue: the man who says little has in his face an orator's articulation.

For a moment, secure in his victory, Tim smokes silently over the depths of Baker Street, still dazedly surfacing from beneath its autumnal sleep, when the fire beckons one back, and the tea, exhibiting those far more pleasant and aromatic steams than the river, transfers the feet once more from the cold boots, reluctantly donned, to the downy slippers.

"And how did you meet her then?" Tim asks when sufficient time has passed for the kettle to finish, and the tea distributed between two cups which upon Caroline's departure were spotless, and now have through unknown misfortunes gathered a number of dings. He couldn't swear to it in court, but he suspects that Mrs. Hudson.

His first cigarette being handily dealt with, Tim moves onto his next. He's taken off his hat and left the fireplace to persuade the mists from its fibers, and now ruffling up his hair, sets upon his tea with the ardor of a good British man who can afford only its frailest relative, more water than leaf.

"How did I meet Caroline," he repeats, and putting his feet up, laughs. "It was back when I was a medical student; I used to work in the chemical laboratory at Bart's Hospital. One afternoon, another student, he comes charging in, dragging this woman after him. Very beautiful, clearly upper class, but dressed in trousers and with her hair down. We were struck for a moment. Nice women, of course, aren't particularly inclined toward hospital laboratories, even with all the abundance of handsome that was hanging round at the time."

"Did you have many good-looking classmates, then?" Tim asks with such innocence on his already angelically-inclined face. He must have plagued his mother.

He links his hands behind his head with a smirk. "Yes, but nothing comparable to me, judging by the way you look at my ass every time you can contrive some thin excuse to walk just a bit behind me. There will be a test on Monday, by the way."

Tim invents a new shade of crimson, and hunches over his tea. But he fires back, "Well, I'm only after a decent score, so don't flatter yourself overly," and returns as casually as he can to his cigarette, leaning just a little farther out the window, so the morning may cool his cheeks.

"Anyway, my classmate clearly isn't sure what to do with her; she's quite indignant. She tells him either she or he can remove his hand, and there's no need for her to add what a poor option the former is. He tells us he's found her in the dissecting-room, beating the subjects with a stick."

Tim's cigarette, as thunderstruck as he, slips from his fingers and disappears over the sill. "Fuck me," he snaps, making a useless grab for it. "Beating…?"

"Yes. And she says to us she was only trying to 'verify how far bruises may be produced after death', in such a tone so as to make us all acutely aware that she's embarrassed for us, that we hadn't thought of it sooner. You've never heard such a silence. No one knows what to make of this, of course. I like anything that shocks me, so naturally when she shows up next day after having been escorted from the premises, I let her into the lab. She says, "Hello!" just as cheerily as one of those wretched 'morning' people who pass you on the street at the hour of Fuck Me. And then she unwinds her scarf and, taking over one of the tables, completely ignores me. Naturally, I assume something is wrong with her and let her be. Two hours later, she shrieks, jumps up from her table, and running toward me with a test-tube in her hand, starts yelling something about re-agents and hemoglobin. 'Here,' she says, and sticks me with a bodkin, and then draws off the blood into a chemical pipette. Now I'm sure she's absolutely mad, so I like her even better. She drops the blood into some water, then adds something to it. Almost immediately it turns a dull sort of mahogany color, and she jumps up and down clapping her hands. 'Do you know what this means for blood stain testing?' she asks, and then, taking my hand, shakes it so hard she almost breaks it. 'My name is Caroline Forbes, and this is the most practical medico-legal discovery in years. I'm really glad you could be here.'"

Tim leans back against the window and laughs heartily; it creates some difficulties in trying to light his next cigarette. "And so how did the pair of you end up here?"

"Immediately afterward, she tells me she's found the 'cutest little flat', but the landlady is terribly old-fashioned and won't rent to a single woman. It's two rooms, she assures me, and she'll be an absolutely excellent roommate. She keeps early hours and she'll have clients in the sitting room from time to time. She's a sort of amateur detective; people bring all those little problems to her that are too delicate for the police, or too complicated. The rent is quite reasonable. Am I interested? I point out that this is how nice ladies get murdered, and then she informs me that she has an impressive working knowledge of botanical poisons, and that I should worry about myself." He pauses for a sip of his cooling tea. "And that's how I ended up with a flat in the city, posing as a respectable husband while leading a string of male lovers past the oblivious landlady. She thinks we're very sociable."

Tim has got the cigarette started at last, but doesn't smoke it. He smiles down into his tea, softly, with the reflective manner of a man who for a moment must wrestle with himself over the question of whether or not to say what is next poised on his tongue. "But she's the only one you've loved."

He looks down into his own tea. Clasps his fingers round it. Lets them loose once more. "My family," he says, with an effort ensuring there is no break in his voice, "is terrible. Just absolute rubbish. Caroline…is the first time I've understood what it's supposed to be like."

Tim thinks on this for a long moment, holding the cold cigarette in his hand, and the tea in the other. He has folded one of his long legs up onto the sill, and rested the tea-bearing hand on his knee, the other braced against the sill. Some internal battle has been won, or perhaps simply out-waited till instinct with all its brash impulsivity has pounced upon its moment, and snuffed all rational inhibitions.

He remains at table; Tim crosses the room and leaning down, takes his face in both rough palms. There is no lust in it; he scarcely recognizes the intention of these thumbs, which with soft strokes feel all the way back to his ears.

The forehead touches him first, holding itself up with his own; he curls a hand round Tim's nape, but does not pull him in.

The lips touch him after an interminable wait; not an inflaming kiss. One human to another. You can pour more into this than any sordid tongue lashing.

Tim pulls away scarcely a moment later, smoothing the hair down by his ears. The warm hands leave him, and are self-consciously buried in the trouser pockets. They each wait for the other to first broach the air which has in these last few seconds gathered the density of a man at least Tim's size. The fogs snoop round the windows.

"I can hit an apple on that globe over by the window with the spear on that wall," he blurts out.

"I don't believe that," Tim says, and the challenge having been issued, he instructs Tim to collect the half-eaten apple from the pile of dishes on the table, and goes to take down the spear.

* * *

Once more into the abyss.

The mongrel tows Caroline merrily along; it surfaces as Melville's great beast must have teased his hunters, the head rearing from the fog, the back afterward, the great brush of eternally wagging tail. It does not flag, but dives through this flotsam of man and nature where industry and river linger and in congenial agreement brew their foul cauldron.

Man, at this hour, is only now wrestling with that contemplation of morning repast, and the streets which necessitate its recuperative charms. Solitary do their shadows rise in Cesarean challenge; and lo do the mists quiver before them.

At any rate, before his.

Ere ten minutes into their journey, the incomparable Toby lurches to one side; but from Caroline there is no triumphal cry of long-awaited discovery. She says to him very gently, "Good boy! You're ok!" in a tone which he imagines she must reserve for Enzo when he is confronted with that mystifying riddle of which boot must be slipped onto which foot; she tousles the mammoth head.

"He's scared of the shadow over there. Enzo, could you move to the left a little, please? So the lamp doesn't catch your silhouette?"

It is beneath him to confer with minds so trivial as the one which Enzo inherited from whatever unfortunate woman wasted her life and her labors in endeavoring to bring him into this world; but even the rustiest of cogs may turn once, with surprising smoothness, as the human soul suddenly, on the threshold of its infirmity, with death before it, spends his last breaths conversing with the astuteness of Plato, before his fever grasps him eternally.

He exchanges a glance with Enzo.

"Come on, Toby! There's a good boy! Yes! Caroline loves you!" she coos, and this being motivation enough for any man or beast, the leash once more pulls taut in Caroline's hand; the titanic paws resume their enthusiastic thunder.

They run on for another few minutes; Enzo, he notes, has not lost any of that physical edge which the army honed. Well. Any jester must see to it that he has the ability to placate his monarch with whatever amusement they require.

The dog stops once more, skittering back into Caroline's waiting arms.

"It's the corner of that building," she explains.

"Are we sure the dog is up to this task? Is there any nose which can really track a trail of fading cologne through London's slums? Perhaps we ought to set Enzo to the task? Go on, let's have the leash; or, rather, he seems to mind well enough on verbal commands. Come on, then. Fetch, mate."

"Ok, first of all, Toby is doing a very good job, and in his defense, in this light, that building does look really scary. And secondly, if you make one more comment comparing Enzo to a dog, or any other servile description you can think of instead of what he is, which is my friend, I'm going to turn around and remind you very viscerally of our first meeting in my apartment. Understand?"

Enzo slings an arm round his shoulders. "Had you by the testicles did she, mate? I wouldn't get too excited about it; even the intermediary criminals get that treatment. She usually reserves something a little more special for the ones she considers her equals."

He picks up the arm from his shoulder with the least number of fingers with which he can still successfully manipulate it, and tosses it aside. "If you don't mind, _mate_ , I go to great lengths to emerge from these sorts of neighborhoods sans fleas."

"Klaus!" she barks.

"Oh, you've nothing to worry about, mate," Enzo adds, tossing the arm once more round him. "Caroline sees to it personally that all hygiene habits are duly observed by any and all employees. Even the junior section of the Baker Street Irregulars are subjected to regular baths."

She turns on them both, pointing a severe finger at him. "Do _not_ turn up at my apartment on bath night. I only personally oversee the youngest Baker Street Irregulars." And then once more her attention is wholly absorbed by the dog, as if he and Enzo both are mere fixtures of the street past which she has ambled time and again, and observed already everything which is necessary to her methods.

* * *

 _There was scant conversation between the participants of this scene. They did not yet know that ahead of them lay a significant triumph, but perhaps the more prescient of them guessed it. Rarely does so momentous a narrative twist settle patiently in the wings, with nary a touch upon the nape hairs._

 _But we will lift the curtain in a moment._

 _They had run on for several blocks puffing little in their youth and conditioning, and stopping only now and again to settle the dog, who barked at imaginary horrors, and balked at ordinary shadows. There was, in that tense chase, a spat or two over the dog's somewhat underwhelming abilities, or at least his fitness in carrying them out; and Caroline, rising with all the fury of Troy's beleaguered armies, Achilles at her heels, Juno over her shoulder, put both men in their firmly established places (one rather higher than the other, of course)._

 _London will not for some hours relinquish its fogs; they have only the occasional gas jet, and the pocket lamp which has been handed off to Enzo. These are not yet those dire mists of winter, 'very black, indeed, more like a distillation of mud than anything else; the ghost of mud- the spiritualised medium of departed mud, through which the dead citizens of London probably tread, in the Hades whither they are translated'; but yet unborn is the man who wades them carelessly._

 _For nigh an hour they weaved through Whitechapel's various passageways; frequently the dog balked; frequently Caroline knelt beside him to scratch the massive head._

 _It was some fifteen minutes to the close of their adventure when He recognised in her a new tension; not the bristling of the unknown, when everything human, responding to some internal disrupt, firms up the fingers, narrows the eye, quickens the step; no: here was the stiffness of the bloodhound who, vaguely sniffing after his prey, knowing somewhere onward he runs, courting his warrens and underbrush, realises suddenly this quarry is not merely a distant existence, long hours from his capture._

 _Caroline and dog stopped._

 _Ahead, through the fogs, there was no miraculous sight; the East End disclosed merely another slum. To sketch it would be useless; there was no distinguishing feature. Here Starvation, Death, Malaise tie on their usual masks, and parade with little fanfare through refuse both human and industrial: O, to look upon the suffering of fellow beasts, and find it monotonous; but the most conscience-stricken social crusader, seeing it before him, turns up his nose, and aims his brimstone elsewhere. Waste a pen stroke on tenements no worse than the usual, and children not bonier than the last- nay. Society requires an outrage._

 _"This way," Caroline whispered, and suddenly tugging on the dog's leash, veered to the left._

 _She took off at such a pace both men were hard-pressed to keep up with her._

 _Perhaps another ten minutes, and the dog might have lost the trail. Perhaps another master at its leash, and they might have taken instead the right passageway._

 _But to the left they turned, with the dog's nose resolutely skyward._

 _At the end of this path, which switched back on itself, plunged, ribboned between walls the men could barely traverse, so that they must have thought it would never end- at the end of this path, was an unremarkable tenement._

 _The dog sat down before it, and looking at Caroline, whined with human plaintiveness._

 _Though he be of weak mind, and limited use, any soldier who has seen himself alive through his campaign still has his instincts; and feeling their threads plucked, Enzo drew his revolver._

 _The dog Caroline tied to the single gas lamp in the small square over which this tenement peered. No other light pierced this unexceptionally dismal building; behind rotting shutters its tenants slept as best their stomachs and ailments allowed them, napping before their few meager coals._

 _Toby had fixated on the entryway to the far right; and it was round this door the three clustered, His hand on Caroline's arm, Enzo with the pistol at his waist._

 _A man with all his belongings on his back, and his few pence in his pocket, has no need of locked doors; but this one was locked. To kick it is a warning; to try the windows another._

 _And so He crouched before the door, and slipping a locksmith's kit from his jacket, manipulated the tumblers noiselessly._

 _In these final moments there was only the sound of their labored breathing; in all audiences there is a similar hush as the actors resume their places; the first act has closed: and both viewer and performer taken their steadying breaths. What either will find upon this second raising of the curtain he cannot say._

 _The lock clicked; Caroline started._

 _The dog watched with tender wariness his master try the knob, and both men attempt to hold her noiselessly back._

 _But she cast off both hands, and turning the knob, surged first into the dirty entryway._

* * *

 _We the faithful readers wish to live beside our favoured protagonists, and breathe their recycled air. You who have ensconced yourself in warm easy chairs, and read this volume now in tranquil domesticity, with candle peeping over your shoulder- you who have shut your windows to every danger of man and nature, and recline safe in your bed, awaiting determined slumbers, which snatch the most invested from their reading: you too feel in yourself this desire, to look: not on the far wall, and its uninteresting plasters. The bedclothes fall away; you have not felt them in some hours yet; London's cobblestones have chattered beneath your aching feet, and London's mists robbed your easy inhalations. And so you too crowd at this open door, one step behind Caroline, your shoulder against the arm of her faithful employee (awe keeps you a handsbreadth removed from He). And you expect to be enlightened with the sudden rush of her discovery, to hear in your thoughts hers, to feel in your heart all the fluttering sensations of her own, and in each find the same visceral pleasure of the rough door you touch now with trembling fingers._

 _We have crawled, often with an excruciating slowness, stopping to turn over every stray pebble, through the underbelly of our protagonist's psyche, and now find ourselves at home. And so we are to share his every lingering pain, and giddy triumph._

 _But there is no earthly term which can describe what transpired within her, when that door creaked open to reveal what lay beyond; and hardly is there sufficient dialogue to encompass all three._

 _With some perseverance, Enzo had finally managed to position himself in front of Caroline, so that whatever might fly from the depths of this lair, be it madman or dust mote, it would strike first his own irrelevant figure._

 _They each took a step forward as though impelled by the same master, with the same string; the door closed softly behind them._

 _Caroline opened her mouth to speak, and found herself mute as my own pen on the subject of her reaction._

 _If the flat had been let to a family, they would have in all that prolific fruitfulness of the underclass shared a single room, and most likely another family besides; but this was clearly the workstation of one man (if we can assign him so humdrum a label). The window on the back wall had a dirty rag tacked over it, and the one beside the door such a layer of grime as to render privacy absolute; but there had been some attempt to put the place to rights, and the floor, oddly, was spotless. In the right corner on a single nail hung a coat, brushed up like a gentleman's, and with new buttons._

 _But we have not come for coats; not yet._

 _The room was unfurnished, but for a single bench along the back wall, and on it a line of specimen jars._

 _Enzo lowered his pistol._

 _Caroline grabbed His arm. She did not need to support herself; women such as herself have no need of a man's encouragement. But even she needed some physical vent, to touch something real, to reiterate to herself: here is reality in all its material functionality. When we have chased something for so long, we accuse every sense, and suspect them of jousting at phantoms; but here was the firm arm, and so she was not dreaming._

 _Enzo returned the pistol to his coat; there was no enemy, and to confront what they had stumbled upon, he needed both hands: one to touch the cold jars, the other to grip the table._

 _In each jar was a bit of tissue suspended in embalming fluid; three in all. Caroline had only the anatomical knowledge sufficient to aid her investigations, but turning to Him with a white face, it was clear Kol and his medical knowledge could not have better confirmed her dark suspicions._

 _Here were the remains of Annie Chapman._

 _There were the fingers steepled beneath the nose, to absorb this fact, and the lowering of the lashes._

 _But only for a moment._

 _And then taking the pocket lantern from Enzo, she shone it round slowly, making a circuit first of the outer corners, and then circling inward, back to the table, in ever-tightening concentric loops._

 _I have said the floor was spotless; and so it looked, on first entrance; so it might have continued to look, to anyone else._

 _But she crossed the room in a single bound, and kneeling beneath the coat, and taking from one of her pockets a little penknife, scraped up a bit of mud, preserved in that perfect shape which names it as having been trapped in a boot tread, new enough to still hold such a sizable clot, and dropped it into a test tube she took from the other pocket._

 _Enzo, having no observations of his own to make, watched her in awe; but He stood beside the table with his hands clasped behind his back, measuring each square inch of each brick and floor board, and coming silently to his own conclusions._

 _"He had a coat he buttoned over his shirt, to hide the blood," Caroline said to herself, as if confirming some earlier theory, and set now to examining the jacket before her._

 _With the benefit of hindsight I can inform the reader that if he did not mean to lead Caroline so tidily to his burrow, neither did the Whitechapel Murderer (as he was then called) expect this hovel to remain forever hidden, and so every precaution had been taken._

 _But he had forgotten the left pocket of the coat._

 _Remember he had been interrupted that morning; remember he was flustered, hastily sated, that he must have felt on his heels this persistent woman, and thought himself finally in danger of a proper collaring, and forgive him this first mistake. Thus far he had been flawless; and we must respect, albeit reluctantly, such mastery of one's craft._

 _From the left pocket of the abandoned coat Caroline fished out a pair of drawers, folded into a neat square._

 _She turned, He was gratified to note, instantly to Him and not Enzo. "None of the women were missing any of their clothing."_

 _And here she dropped the subject, proving it vital._

 _"Enzo, you come with me. Klaus," she said, and advancing a step toward Him, lifted both her hands to his chest, having thrust the drawers into a trouser pocket. "Can I trust you to stay here, in case he comes back?"_

 _They both knew their quarry would not return; his morning hunt had born fruit; he had already retired once more to his regular life with all its mundane accoutrements._

 _But she brought the small hands up to lightly touch him, just for a moment through the cloth of his secondhand shirt, thin with previous wear._

 _It is useless to explain his acquiescence; you have already guessed its reason, though He himself had yet to fully suss why the small hands should have such power over him._

 _And so He allowed them to pass once more into the night, with some new task Caroline did not see fit to entrust to him._

 _But he had made his own observations. And He was not, as has already been amply demonstrated, lacking in the mental acuity to draw from them his own conclusions._

 _The landlady and neighbors were of no use to him; no one so clever as to evade Himself and Caroline would have made himself known to them in any describable manner._

 _But the mud._

 _Now that is exciting._

* * *

Enzo detours to drop off Toby with his master, leaving his pistol in lieu of himself with her; she is just coming down Baker Street at a dead run when a loud bang skids her to a halt beneath the window of her own apartment.

"What the _hell_?" she blurts out, and looking up, sees the window star over; one frosty circle the size of a penny, which joins the other half dozen spread out in an uneven line beside it.

Behind the window, Tim and Kol can be seen laughing.

She takes the stairs to 221B two at a time.

"What are you _doing_?" she shrieks as she bursts through the door, and Tim freezes; Kol calmly collects a freaking _spear_ from the floor.

"Target practice. You never know when you might need to throw a spear with enough accuracy to spit an apple, darling."

She puts her fingers together beneath her nose, prayer-like; thou shalt not kill, or whatever. "Ok. First of all, that is a _relic_ from one of my cases; it belongs on the wall, _not_ in your destructive little hands."

"They're hardly little. Just like everything else."

" _Secondly_ ," she says, choosing very generously to ignore his interruption, "this one time, I am going to forget what I just saw, and you are both going to go unpunished, because I don't have time for this right now. And because I need you to identify some underwear for me."

She can hear Enzo at the front door, and a moment afterward on the stairs; he appears in the doorway breathing hard, hair plastered to his forehead, holding his right side; he's run all the way home on her heels, on the alert for murderers. The boys all greet one another like they've met incidentally at a pub, three years after their last adventure; she shakes the drawers at them. "Kol."

"Yes, I heard you, darling. I'm just trying to get my head round the hypocrisy of my sexual trophies being banned from the flat for 'crassness', while you get to parade yours round in front of God and Enzo."

"There have been two more murders," she says, and Kol and Tim drop this little cutsey side eye thing they have going on, like she can't spot an inattentive jerk at five hundred yards. "Do you recognize these?" she asks Kol, now holding out the drawers. "You're more familiar than anyone I know with a variety of women's undergarments. Do they look familiar at all? What about the shop they could have come from? These are not a poor woman's drawers. They don't belong to any of the victims, but we found at least one of his lairs, and these in a coat he'd hung up. And considering the fact that we also found Annie Chapman's missing reproductive organs in the same room, I assume they're fairly significant to him."

She waits for some faux indignation about his character in that tone he uses so everyone knows whichever slight has been applied against him is exactly, enjoyably correct; but he just leans his hip against the table.

"I have an idea where to start making inquiries," he says. "The Underground will get us there quickest. Have you a scarf?" he asks Tim, and going to the coat tree by the door, pulls down his own.

"Not on me. But I've this," Tim replies, pulling a white pocket square out of his jacket pocket, and finds something in this revelation to blush over; Kol looks pleased. If there is any creature stranger than a boy, she has yet to stumble over it.

They leave at a brisk trot; Enzo shuts the door behind them.

She stands for a moment in the center of the room, completely still.

"They kissed," she says, and runs for her microscope while Enzo puts the kettle on.

* * *

At the booking office Tim's attempt to pay for his own third class ticket is soundly overridden; there's hardly any use in hanging about rich men with a face like that if you cannot squeeze some pecuniary advantage from it, now is there, darling?

They muffle themselves to their noses and from the first class platform transfer into their carriage, where Tim spends some time expounding upon the wonders of a floor sans its passengers' bodily excretions.

"Gentlemen aren't allowed to spit," he tells Tim. "They strip you of your title if you do it."

On disembarkation he unwinds the scarf to free up his mouth; you never know what you're going to need it for, after all.

Behind the Strand is a thin street he herds Tim toward with the ease of someone who may perhaps have visited it a time or two (or three; that dogged sudsing of the Mikaelson name is the sole domain of Elijah; he admits his vices freely).

"You think a shop on Holywell Street sold an upper class set like that?" Tim asks with a raised eyebrow. He clutches for his cigarettes; the shop windows have unsettled his Catholic propriety.

"We're not going to ask after Caroline's little trophy at a shop."

The mist has got its teeth into this street; the few pedestrians who have not yet got round to their beds at this hour suggest corporeality, and then once more are phased out in bits, so that the fog, challenging this human condescension to see himself in everything, hints round some mutinous graveyard, where the peaceful dead have tired of their moss, and seek a new monotony.

Tim, making fleeting eye contact with the pornography in the shop windows, takes out a cigarette.

Industry has forgotten this corner of London; in the buildings there is still that hint of Shakespearean design, shackled to its elder ghosts; half-timbered houses challenge the bookshops for their bit of pavement, the gables poking out their bay windows. At number 37 is one of the Fire's few survivors: a golden half-moon with sulky lips which now announces its wares of books and secondhand china. To the left, down Half-Moon Passage and its wafts of urine can be seen, in fairer weather and busier hours, the Strand and its knot of vehicles and customers; the mists have now shut it out completely.

In front of one of the picture shops is a man in tails, wiggling his fingers about beneath his coat; they are both looked over with open invitation.

He puts his arm through Tim's. Tim, invested in his cigarette, sees neither the man's look nor his intent, but smiles in shy approval at the arm round his.

They walk on through the fog, toward the right fork and then down onto Wych Street.

"You might want to cross yourself," he tells Tim, and reaching for the keyhole of one of the nearby houses, where the owner has seemingly, with extraordinary absent-mindedness, left his key dangling freely about for all and sundry, lets them into the dimly-lit foyer.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph; me mother will turn over in her grave," Tim says.

There is gas lighting farther on, in the individual rooms, but here the hall is navigated by means of a few down-at-heel candles. Having seen a few of the inhabitants in full daylight, he can confirm: it's best the flames gentle their features, darlings.

"The drawers belong to a prostitute whose undergarments you're familiar enough with to make out at a glance, then," Tim says from behind him, with the Church at full steam in his voice.

"No. They belong to my sister."

Tim demonstrates remarkable restraint; not even a titillated gasp; he's somewhat disappointed. Perhaps he wore himself out over the prostitute; one can only hope. What a tragedy, to learn you are out of scandals, and all your remaining days arrayed benignly, with gentlemen tipping their hats in your esteemed direction.

"I'm not going to ask how you can identify your sister's knickers with such confidence."

"But I bet you're a little curious."

"No, I'm not."

"'I'm a single child', you're thinking to yourself. 'Maybe I just don't understand? Sure siblings must always be getting an innocent peek at one another.'"

"Stop doing me accent; you sound like an eejit."

They penetrate deeper (you see what he did there) into the hall, passing the long line of open doors which gape to show their availability, Tim crowding him from behind, as if he's worried some sexual disease might peep its head round one of the doors, and noting an unsullied cock, sail with gay enthusiasm toward its latest victim. He once knew a count who contracted syphilis under such tragic circumstances.

Round a turn they begin to encounter the first of the closed doors, which a periodical might whisper with prim concern over society's susceptibility to inflaming language (societies have notoriously collapsed from a single utterance of the word 'whore-pipe') hold behind them 'mankind in his most primitive form, where the clay is but silt, and all his nobler aspirations dust', and which he can tell you are full of fucking.

"Here, you go on," he tells Tim, moving aside to make room for him in the passageway. "It's rather dark back here; we'll need your face to light the way."

"Go on and fuck yourself now," Tim says pleasantly.

Another bend takes him to the door he needs; it is tightly shut.

You've got to make a little fanfare of it.

He kicks in the door.

The two women on the bed spring apart, each pulling the sheet against her breasts.

Bekah makes a sound like a scream, though that's rather a human classification; it's dangerous to ascribe anything human to Bekah. Conjure instead those shrill cries of the bogs, where lurk the shades of beleaguered souls. But a little more hair-raising.

" _Kol_!" she shrieks, and with her eyes makes a perfectly serious attempt on his life.

"Tim, my sister. My sister, Tim. Katherine," he says, sweeping a little bow toward the woman beside Bekah, who has now let down the sheet and arranged the long brown hair round her nipples, very fetching; she has an artist's eye for framing.

"Hullo," Tim says to the ceiling.

"Celebrating the demise of, what is it, husband number seven? I can never keep track of them." He throws himself down on the bed between both women, bouncing cheekily.

"I've been married _four_ times, you absolute knob," Bekah snaps, and slaps the top of his head.

He yawns.

"Listen, darling, it's none of my business-"

"Then _get out_ , prig."

"But I'm not terribly appreciative of you trying to horn in on my territory. Sexual deviancy is my thing; why don't you find something else?" he runs on, completely ignoring her outburst. "It's just so dreadfully unoriginal of you. What about something in theater? That ought to put a twist in Elijah's knickers."

"Get _out_ ," she hisses, trying to roll him off the bed with a thrashing of her feet beneath the covers; he holds onto the side of the mattress and rides out her little tantrum. " _Kol_."

Katherine, always with an eye to business, studies Tim with all the careful practice of an auctioneer appraising his next bit of horse flesh. "You know, we have female customers occasionally. And men with…extra-societal tastes." She smiles. "If you're looking to make some extra money."

"No thank you," Tim says once more to the ceiling, beginning to sweat.

"He's not a prostitute, Katherine."

"He could be. I'm only being charitable; he looks as if he could use the extra money, and I had a girl die last week."

"Yes, I can see exactly how charitable you can be when the mood strikes." He wiggles his eyebrows through another round of Bekah's incessant kicking. "But anyway, darlings. As much as I enjoy interrupting torrid dalliances, it's not why I'm here."

"No, you're here because I must have done something terrible in a past life, like be ugly," Bekah says sourly, pummeling his spine.

"The gravest of all the sins," he adds solemnly, and then delving into his jacket pocket, he throws the wadded-up drawers right into her bratty face.

She sputters indignantly, clawing them from her mouth. "These are mine, you degenerate. What are you doing waltzing round with them in your pocket?"

"I know they're yours; that's why I'm here. You've just got yourself mixed up in a murder case, darling."

The kicking stops. She sits up straighter, still holding the sheet to her breasts, as if everyone in the room hasn't already seen everything there is to care about. "Which one?"

"Been a bit free with the strychnine lately, have we?"

"No, you idiot; I'm related to a pack of absolute lunatics. Who knows what you've done now."

"Not me, but you may have heard of him. The Whitechapel Murderer?" That's got their attention. It's nice to be truly appreciated for once, to have so much bated breath dependent upon one's next revelation. Nik always gets those moments. Hogs them, really; you never can get in a surprise edgewise while he's mucking about stabbing people when they least suspect it and whatnot. "At first I thought you might have had your sticky little fingers in this business, but Caroline is positive the murderer is a man, and she's rarely wrong about these things. Not to mention, it's just not really your style. Now, if they'd been found facedown next to their afternoon meal of arsenic and tea, I might have to make a difficult choice about whether or not to turn you over to Caroline."

"Would you get to the point, you little beast?" she demands.

"Your drawers were found amongst some of his things. And by 'things' I mean the mutilated trophies he took from his victims, so I assume these are rather important to him." He turns now on an elbow to face her, gratified to note that all the colour has gone from her cheeks, and the imperiousness fled. "Slept with anyone particularly nasty lately, darling? I mean above and beyond your usual fare."

He licks his lips a little, the way Nik does. You don't want to have it out all at once; the only rapt audience is a waiting audience.

"Because, Bekah darling, it would appear you know the Whitechapel Murderer with enough intimacy to grant him if not regular, at least easy, access to your undergarments."

* * *

 _Here, dear reader, we must call an intermission._

 _For indeed, rapt is the audience who poises at the mouth of his discovery, and suddenly upon entering it finds the door shut in his face._

* * *

 **A/N: This part covers a very short time period, obviously; if you're familiar with the Jack the Ripper case, you know that after his double murder he takes some time off before striking his last canonical victim. The next part, then, will slow down a bit and deal a lot with the relationships between the characters.**

 **And yes, KC is going to do it, I promise.**

 **Next up, all your burning questions answered: how DID Kol know those were Rebekah's panties? Will Bekah get married again? Exactly how does the KC sex go down (cymbal clash)? How many more murder puns can Jenn squeeze in? And, oh yeah- who is murdering all these prostitutes?**

 **Tune in whenever I have time to actually write, research, and proofread all of this and more!**


	5. Part Five

**A/N: Hello, dear, patient readers! Long time no see! I'm aware that I said in my last author's note that the preceding chapter was probably going to be the penultimate one, which would make this the final chapter. Alas, it is not the final chapter; you know me and how I'm a lying liar about the length of my fics. This chapter, however, is _actually_ the penultimate part; I even named it 'Sherlock Fic Penultimate Chapter' in google docs, so obviously it has to be true. I don't want to babble too long because I just want this all done and finished before the weekend, so here I'll just note that this quote, 'The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery' is from Dickens' 'Bleak House'.**

 **And now, away we go.**

* * *

For a solid three days a steady stream of Mikaelsons can be found bursting in and out of her apartment and congregating in her sitting room.

Klaus finishes two of her experiments while waiting for her to return one evening; Rebekah and Kol break another of her vases fighting over who's prettier or whatever (she doesn't want to know; she walks in on the end of the altercation, after Tim has inserted himself between Kol and the fire poker lady!Klaus is waving about). An immaculately-dressed stranger just appears one day, politely inquiring after his brothers' availability for tea.

"They're all lunatics," she complains one night, sweeping the hair she has already trimmed from Enzo's collar, and standing back to critique his bangs. "How the _hell_ am I supposed to make any progress on this case when I have to constantly worry about keeping them all alive so I don't have to clean their intestines off my ceiling?"

"Ah, they're rich, gorgeous; they're a bit more civilized than that. They'd splash it no higher than the walls, I'm sure."

Kol bangs open the door. "Where were we off to again? I'm a bit drunk."

Tim peeps over his shoulder.

She sighs. "17 Gloucester Street."

"Right. You can count on us, etc."

He bangs the door shut.

Enzo shifts in the armchair to cross one leg over the other, blowing a stray hair off his nose as she sets to work with the scissors once more. "Listen, gorgeous. I know your brain is three times larger than my humble mind, so I know you haven't forgotten that in the company of Tim, Kol has tortured a man, thoroughly damaged the entire Irish Exhibition, plus put a spear through your window, and that sending him along as a governess hardly keeps the rambunctious little bastard in line, so there's obviously some other design at work here."

"They also kidnapped somebody," she adds, snipping carefully.

"I hadn't heard about that one yet."

"Oh, yeah. So, I send them around to talk to this guy in connection with the Elizabeth Stride murder, right? And I'm thinking, of course, that they ask him politely to stop by the apartment in the afternoon so I can ask him a few things. He wasn't a suspect, just a member of the club where she was found. So about an hour later, a cab pulls up outside, and then Tim pops into the apartment. He asks will I come down to the cab, and I want to know why, and he says, 'Well, our man slipped his bonds so Kol's sitting on him.' So then I realize they have _tied this man up_ and abducted him, and when I ask Tim why they didn't just politely let this guy know that a consulting detective attached to the Whitechapel murders would like to interview him over tea, he says, 'Em, he wouldn't come nicely.'" She makes three more precise snips, and whips the sheet from Enzo's chest. "You're done."

"Thanks, love."

"Anyway, the answer is, yes, there are other designs at work. They're in love, but they're idiots."

"Right. So we're just going to bash them against one another till they fall into one another's…arms," he says with this rakish little smile. She kisses his cheek.

"Exactly!"

"Well, anyway, it's a bit entertaining, watching the little sod off his head for some gawky Irish lad who wouldn't hurt a fly."

"Unless that fly were a regular, law-abiding citizen of the British Empire that I need to talk to like civilized humans instead of spending an hour calming him down enough to get anything useful out of him. But I'm not bitter. Do you think they've done it yet?"

"Nah; I'd have got it out of either of them. At the very least, Tim would be walking about with a permanent glow. Probably the little tosser too." He takes a nice, gentlemanly sip from the teacup she hands him. "Speaking of idiots in love," he says, rising from the chair facing the window, and leisurely drinking his tea as he watches something through it.

"Are they back already? If Kol asks me one more time where it was they were supposed to go, I swear to _God_. He is _not_ drunk, he thinks it's funny to test Caroline when she has a lot of things on her plate and is just a little stressed out-"

"Not that smitten idiot. My dearest friend and comrade, Himself." He takes another sip from his tea, completely nonplussed by her ranting.

"Klaus?"

"Yes, and he bears gifts."

"What does he have? He is _not_ , like, carrying some dress in the exact same shade as my eyes that will fit me better than anything any tailor has ever done, is he, because that is so creepy and I _swear_ he has gone through my closet."

"Looks like tubes of some sort. Chemicals, I'd guess. Do you want me to intercept him?"

She purses her lips for a moment in agonized contemplation. "No; I could use some more hydrochloric acid. But you answer the door. Be as rude as you want."

* * *

She has all the threads.

The soil is from Germany; Baden Baden, to be precise.

The Whitechapel Murderer is a man of some gentlemanly means with connections to Rebekah Mikaelson and Scotland Yard; he took a trip to Germany between the Chapman and Stride/Eddowes murders. He has the working anatomical knowledge of a man who has made some study of it, but has not made it his profession; he is not outwardly mad. His victims have been charmed thoroughly enough to wander off into London's worst corners under no suspicion of imminent peril.

"And you don't know anyone like that?" she asks Rebekah, who has taken the best chair in the apartment and sits studying her nails, pointedly ignoring Kol, who has kicked up one of his muddy boots on the armrest even though she has told him and _told him_ : no feet on the furniture.

"You mean do I know a charming lunatic with enough anatomical prowess to cut up a few whores who can pass as a functioning member of society well enough to fool even some piddling consulting detective?"

"Thanks, darling, but it wasn't me. You know I always take credit for my work. One has to jump on their accomplishments before Nik finds some way to make it all his idea."

"I wasn't talking about _you_ ," Rebekah snaps. "I mean Nik. Did you ever look past your pathetic little infatuation long enough to consider that perhaps the killer has been right under your snub nose all along?" Rebekah fixes her with this haughty stare that no queen has ever perfected, but she once tackled a triple murderer onto a train track with a bullet in her shoulder, ok, and you cannot fold her with all the bitch-eyed judgements in the world.

"Ok, first of all? _Your_ brother is the one with some sort of weird obsession, and maybe you find any little scrap of male attention flattering, but frankly? It really creeps me out and if he never crossed my threshold again that would be to my _enormous_ pleasure. _He's_ the one who showed up here-" She stops. Kol is watching her with this alertness he tries to hide; he tries to be this flighty dandy. You can give people that, and they'll never come looking for anything else.

She clears her throat. "Anyway. It's not Klaus. I would know."

"Would you?" Rebekah asks.

"Nik hasn't been to Germany since February. And do you really think he'd parade round with your knickers in his pocket, Bekah? Caroline's knickers, fine, but I doubt that he'd have any use for yours. They've seen things that simply can't be washed out, and even Nik's crassness has limitations. They aren't fit for a painting rag."

Rebekah tries to stab him with the letter opener on the mantel.

"Stop!" she hollers, clapping her hands twice, sharply. "Stab him in your own home, on your own time."

This limitation is too much for Rebekah, who walks out shortly afterward, having offered nothing helpful.

Kol sits so quietly in his chair she feels this creeping distress; this must be some sort of medical episode.

"Be careful, Caroline." He sounds so tired. He sounds like something has been put on him that he never intended to carry, and now he does not know how to set it down. "With Nik, I mean. No one controls Nik except Nik, Caroline. I know you think you have him round your little finger." He looks up at her with this rare solemnity, fist under his chin, and there are these little lines around his eyes; and she thinks: but you're only twenty-three. Sometimes you forget how much a friend has lived, because you cannot confront how many of their finite wanderings they have already put behind them. "But Nik gets what he wants, or people die."

She moves over to the chair. His other hand is on the armrest, big, powerful; not an aristocrat's hand at all; something a man could die by. You can see where he's broken three of his knuckles, and the cut he took defending her from a bottle in a Spitalfield's pub.

She puts her hand over his, and sets her forehead against his. "I know he's hurt you."

"Not as irreparably as he could," Kol points out, looking up into her eyes.

* * *

"What do you think of these messages from our man Jack?" Enzo asks, helping her sort a stack of news clippings on the Whitechapel murders into chronological order. Kol, upon stumbling out of his room at noon, took one look at their project and left in search of drugs, alcohol or Tim; she has her suspicions which he found first, and now waits for the inevitable telegraph: "Come at once to Scotland Yard. Have escaped own cell; in need of assistance with springing Tim."

"Fake," she pronounces matter-of-factly.

"You don't think he might be toying with the bobbies?"

"Oh, he's doing that, but subtly; this isn't him. The letters are not written by an educated man. And the most important detail, the ears he promised to take and send to the police: why didn't he fulfill that? He promises in the letter that on his next job he'll clip off the lady's ears and 'send to the police officers'. But neither Eddowes nor Stride were missing their ears. A day after the murder, the postcard shows up, and he says, 'I wasn't codding dear old boss when I gave you the tip. You'll hear about saucy Jacky's work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn't finish straight off. Had not time to get ears for police'. He may not have had time to mutilate Stride, but he certainly did with Eddowes. It would have been the easiest way to prove his identity. The first letter wasn't publicly available prior to the murder; no one knew its contents other than the writer, the Central News Office, and Chief Constable Williamson. And yet he didn't do what the letter explicitly promised even though Eddowes was horrifically mutilated."

Enzo snaps open another newspaper. "The headlines are starting to look like a collection of penny dreadful titles."

"That's because no one is interested in straight facts, they want to see how many gasps they can wring out of the public at large."

They sift in silence for a moment.

"Since the middle of a murder discussion is the perfect opportunity to do this, listen, gorgeous: if you need me to marry you to get your number one fan and London's most secretly wanted out of your hair, we can elope tomorrow."

She sighs and brings a finger to either temple. "No; he'd just arrange an 'accident' and then swoop in while I'm still in my mourning period and he doesn't have any competition from any potential suitors who actually give a crap about good manners." She touches his chin, smiling softly. "I appreciate the offer, though. That is the second marriage proposal I've had, and the only one worth actually accepting."

* * *

She has all the threads.

She has all the threads, but there is a blindness; it has splashed its milk in her eyes. Earth's fogs have always for her been no more than an annoyance; clarity has never strayed in blind fumblings into those netherworlds of artistic muse.

But at midnight, two, three, all these hours when the world has settled into its warm beds, and carefully stokes its bayings for the next day, she has to sit waiting for it; she draws up faces with the same realism of Klaus' most careful labors, and yet the details have grown moss. The bend of an ear, the curve of his lips-these are not born the way of men, whose features have all been molded from finite resources and are assembled with a few petty inferences.

This man, no; he just…exists somewhere, somehow, inexplicably. She cannot pencil in the lines of his jaw and with feathery strokes layer the hair about his ears. In some distant grave his sallow ancestors sleep in soft down of grave mold and mice; and his living sons, daughters, siblings-these walk about wearing bits of his face, and she cannot see him. There are a thousand slivers of him, in the faces that have come before and the ones which will come after. She chases him in photographs, and in the streets watches the crowd until she sees a cheekbone-yes, that might be it, there's a suggestion of-

But she always loses it.

She thinks: maybe it's Klaus. Maybe it's Klaus, and she is sightless because Kol's canny look was right, she feels more than she says, she thinks of him sometimes in the hours between Kol's homecoming and her bedtime when the gas lamp has burnt low and London has sent the mists in silky whisperings along her windows, seeking entry.

Sometimes she thinks, when the fog has cleared, she will see him standing underneath her window, looking up at her, and something will move her automatically; no deliberate turn of her own foot, but a tugging of something stronger, something older, she won't have any words for it: she'll just go to it.

That's how nice girls disappear, she tells herself, and turns down the lamp.

* * *

When she has not slept for two days straight and all the boys have gathered in her apartment in various states of attentiveness, she tells them, "I need to see a man."

"Don't we all," Kol says, and blatantly undresses Tim with his eyes.

"A _specific_ man. Someone who might have information about this case."

"So go and see him, darling."

"There's a slight problem that I need everyone's help with. So…this man used to work for me as an informant. He has ties to some of the few gangs that aren't actually under Klaus' control. The issue is, we sort of had a falling out."

"Over a case?" Enzo asks.

"Over some party planning," Kol answers for her. "I remember this one. This man is not the problem; he's a coward who can be bought for just about any price. The problem is getting through his bodyguard to have a go at him in the first place."

"Heavily armed? Former military? Rabid? What's so special about him?" Enzo presses.

"He's gigantic. He makes Tim look like a stunted infant. His neck is the size of the three of us put together."

"Ah." Enzo waves his hand. "I've had bigger."

"Don't exaggerate that one drunken moment we had, darling. You'll make Tim jealous."

She rolls her eyes. "Anyway. You can bring your guns, but do _not_ shoot him unless he's literally about to kill one of you. Kol, I know you are deliberately not looking at me. Make eye contact with me right now, so I can gauge exactly how spectacularly you are going to break this very simple rule."

"I make no guarantees when you place ridiculous no killing restrictions on me, darling."

She chooses to ignore this. Enzo can control him. Probably. Maybe. "So, is everyone in? This trip is optional. Kol isn't exaggerating about the bodyguard's size."

"And will you be going without us if we refuse?" Tim asks, shifting about on the arm of the chair in which Kol has perched, and she does not protest this blatant violation of sitting etiquette because they're kinda' ridiculously cute.

"Yes. But I am bringing my cane."

Tim sighs.

Enzo cracks his knuckles.

"Right, darling," Kol says, and rolling up one leg of his trousers, takes the gun holstered there and hands it across to her. "Just in case you see him making for my face or anything. We wouldn't want to lose that particular commodity."

* * *

"So you want information on this Ripper fellow?"

"No; I want information on one of his latest victims, Elizabeth Stride. I heard through the grapevine that you knew her and might be able to account for the hours before her death."

"Your fucking bastard little spies is what you mean; I've got them all up my aresehole at all hours of the day."

She smiles with the quiet humility of a Proper Lady. "Don't be ridiculous; you couldn't talk a maggot in there. Anyway, you can help me or not, but I think you know which is the better option."

Sydney McCalister sits for a moment at his desk, and then, leaning over it, spits at her feet. "You break down me door with these three knobs, attack my man, and now you want me to help you? We don't have an agreement anymore, Miss Forbes. So fuck yourself and have a nice day."

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Kol on the bodyguard's shoulders, engaged in beating the man's head with a brick he's found somewhere; Enzo is mid-head butt; Tim collects himself and hat from the floor.

"Ok, here are your options. You can cooperate with me right now, or I can bring down your entire organization tomorrow afternoon. I have some free time around 3:00."

There's a crash behind her; Kol has dramatically exited the fight.

She and Sydney stand for a long moment in this obstinate impasse where he tries to impress upon her the immeasurable size of his will and she waits until he remembers that he's actually kind of a little bitch, and not in the good, elegantly lordly way like she is.

Sydney's eyes change, and for a moment she thinks, good, good: he remembers. Some girls wear their men like a noose, with tired acquiescence. Some girls.

And then she realises.

By the pricking of her thumbs, something Klaus this way comes.

She can feel him behind her; he doesn't touch her; he never needs to.

"Hello, mate. Good to see you again. I'm sure you can now see reason and you'll be happy to cooperate with my colleague here." She can hear the smile in his voice; there's this particular sort of murdery smugness; she doesn't know how to describe it. "And if not, once I'm done with you, we can always hand you over to my sister, hmm?"

* * *

Sydney McCalister supplies the last three weeks of Elizabeth Stride's life in minute detail, and on a hazy Thursday is discovered dismembered on the Thames' south shore.

Klaus has invited himself over for tea as per his Thursday routine (he stops taking clients from noon to three, in order to free his afternoon; he hopes she appreciates this) and now sits stirring milk into his Earl Grey. On his right thumb is a smudge of charcoal, and underneath the nail a crust of dried blood; he has recently come from the Underground, and no later than this morning lingered somewhere in the vicinity of Westminster.

She checks his boots, his trouser cuffs, his shirt sleeves, and they all tell innocently of the usual London ramblings, where all of its beasts with sly murmurings leave behind their dusty accrual from which no man, be he destitute or dandy, saves his hems. If she finds in one fold reason for suspicion, another acquits him; and still a third indicts him once more.

Nik gets what he wants, or people die, Kol told her.

So she focuses on the blood under his fingernail. She forgets that he asked about her day first, instead of bragging about his own. She tells herself: here his dimples hold no power, and sit in impotent sway, so freaking close to dominion, with the crown half-seated; but once it seemed a boy told her with everything that was in him it was her completely, for all time, and left her for Elena. So she learned what a frail and feckless thing is romance, when you pick a boy and not a man. Mostly you do; better fisherman, with more time on their hands, and infinite patience, have already cleared the sea of its bass, and thrown back the bottom feeders.

Perhaps this one dresses better, and has learned how to arrange his hair; but she'll need to crush him all the same.

"Why did you kill Sydney McCallister?" she says in this perfectly well-bred tone, like she's asking after his morning.

Klaus blows on his tea, and takes it with a posh sip. "Well, he wasn't very polite to you." He dimples at her over the rim of his cup.

She tries to remember this is not the first time she's seen it, this is the same look he's given a hundred women, a hundred times over, and also he's sort of a callous murderer; and, ok; some of her closest friends might possibly-in the strictest and most proprietary sense of technicality-have killed in circumstances not _firmly_ limited to self-defense, but they always had good intentions. Possibly not Kol. But she's working on him. And Tim seems to be a good influence, aside from the kidnapping + most recent rumors of a riotous joy ride in a police hansom.

"You cannot _kill_ people for being rude."

He doesn't seem to even remotely comprehend that. "I haven't had any problems with it so far."

She snatches the plate of biscuits away from him when he reaches for it, just because she's feeling petty, and also the boys will be upset if they return from their sleuthing to find none left over. He smiles at her like she's just invented something essential, something world-altering, and has kept it just for the two of them, something intimate they can remember and draw on for years, with one knowing look.

"Did his information prove to be of any use?" he asks, pouring a refill of her tea with this sort of husbandly élan that most definitely enrages her.

"No. Literally nothing came of it." She leans back in her chair with a sigh; he rests his elbows on the table, and propping his chin on his fist, devotes his full and proper attention to her, like a worshipper. He really creeps her out sometimes; who looks at anyone like that? Is there in all this world any one human, with all their eccentricities and occasional bathroom indiscretions who deserves this… _reverence_? You can't revere your fellow man; he will let you down, always.

But then she isn't a man, and that's Matt talking. There was an American boy for whom she was an interruption; and then he found what he was looking for, the way they do, and she thought, for a while, perhaps it was Destined like that; she could have a brain, or she could be loved. Society cannot bring itself to excuse both.

So, actually.

She's earned this look. It's time for him to be impressed by someone who isn't him, anyway (she is absolutely, completely positive that never pales for him, there will never be a day when Klaus Mikaelson doesn't so much as fill his chamber pot without expecting a round of genuine applause from the servants; there are some people for whom even arrogance ages with their bones, and retains only the stale pleasure of a youth barely remembered. But he will never understand how the pervasive religious awe he must feel every time he catches one teensy glimpse of himself in the mirror could ever just stop).

"When you have studied a thousand cases, and you can't solve the thousand and first, there's really no excuse for that level of incompetence, though Scotland Yard does its best. But this…there haven't been a thousand cases. I have a handful of criminals to examine, to try and piece together how this man thinks, how he formed these desires, why he's picking prostitutes specifically. What do the mutilations mean? Is it revenge? Does he get sexual satisfaction from it? Does that mean he's impotent? Is he taking out his rage on women in general, or a specific woman? When I started this case, I thought…I thought for sure I could…see him. I know so much about him. I can describe his probable hobbies, or at least rule out several. I know he's spent much, if not all, of his adult life in the city of London, and he's angry, but he tamps it down. He can walk among us like…like he's just a man. I feel like he's right there, at the edge of my brain, like something I knew once but have forgotten."

"I doubt there's very much you forget," he says quietly, looking at her like…like something he's never seen before, and understands he can never in all the time of man encounter ever again.

Carefully, carefully; you do not give him the power of something under your bed, that watches with vigilant eyes the smiting of the lamps, but neither do you draw from your reserves of human behavior to predict next his calculated maneuvering.

He leans over the table with his usual blasé attitude toward things like personal space.

But two can play at that game, buddy, and also, she just so happens to have some cleavage on display. You can put a brain nearly as capable as her own into a man, and still he defaults to his penis.

He does an admirable job of finding her eyes, though. "Do you think, Miss Forbes," he says, and now he's lowered his voice to this shade of Confidante that a listener at the other end of the room couldn't pick up, "that it's me? That's what you want to know, isn't it?" Their hands touch in the middle of the table. He doesn't do it casually; they barely brush, but he makes sure: his pinkie settles along the back of her hand with the strange electricity of a near miss, when all the hairs on the wrists rise in wary confusion.

"No," she says evenly, not moving her hand, not moving her face, but letting him know, she doesn't sit back from men like him, she doesn't slink away into her chair just because their breath is on her, she can feel something she doesn't want stirring in her stomach, and tingling in her fingertips. "I wouldn't let you outsmart me like that."

People don't often please him; he is too busy being amazed by himself.

But he likes this.

He folds his hands together in the middle of the table; not in his own space, but right over her own hands, as if he doesn't notice there is some impediment between him and table.

The door opens and admits Kol and Enzo; Tim lingers below, enduring a lecture from Mrs. Hudson about a bit of mud he forgot on his boots and has now tracked over the floor.

They don't look away from one another. She hears the door half-open, hears it stop, hears Kol open his mouth, take the breath for whatever it is he means to shout down to Tim, hears it stop, hears everything stop, his fingers on the knob, the inhalation in his throat. He assesses them in silence for a moment. She does not turn to look at him; she can feel his eyes; she knows he's measuring the touching hands, the locked eyes, he is reading in everything all the little details which he needs to decide exactly what he's going to do about this.

In his usual cavalier voice which he uses to wheedle cute boys and threaten gangsters at gunpoint, he says, "Hello, Nik. What an unpleasant surprise. Bekah isn't lurking about, is she? I've only one gun on me today."

* * *

He is just tidying up the ledgers when Kol walks into his office, whistling.

Mrs. Harrison has requested another poisoning; the old biddies are most astonishingly uncreative. He'll need to arrange an accident for her; anyone with such little imagination is hardly worthy of his time, let alone even London's admittedly smutty atmosphere. One can always use the spare oxygen for something better.

He flips open his sketch pad and takes up his charcoal, contemplating the corner of Caroline's mouth, which bags sullenly, and has in it none of the vitality of the real article; perhaps it is for no mortal hand to recreate it in the mundane tools to which he is resigned (nay: condemned, when there is such a subject before him). But surely he can do better than this.

Kol stops before his desk.

His brother bears a remarkable similarity to any of the bestiola genus, and can be ignored till he determines that his presence is not required. Harsh, but one does have to bide his time carefully, and devote it to higher pursuits, when he is so gifted, and pressed for time.

"Hello, brother," Kol says with alarming politeness.

He pauses with his hand midway through its first tentative correction; he lifts his eyes.

There is the favored bat over one shoulder; the hair and shirt are a characteristic disaster. In neither of these is there cause for concern, unless you are Elijah, and have with naïve faith neglected to give up on coaxing him into a proper suit.

The politeness, however.

He lowers the charcoal.

"I presume I can help you with something, brother dear?" he asks with smooth menace.

"Actually, darling, I just stopped by to pick up an old friend." Kol indicates his bat with a pleasant smile. "And to let you know, with my compliments, Nik, that if you lay a finger on so much as one of these curls," and here Kol reaches out his hand, and smudges the drawing beneath his stub of charcoal, "I'll break every bone in your body with it."

His brother has seen to it that no one takes him seriously; it is a softness in him. The clown need not take his jabs critically; he has only put forth his mask, and never himself.

So Kol leans over the table, and puts them nose to nose; he holds the bat off to the side. There is no room now for these distancing implements of apathetic wood or metal; in some confrontations only flesh will do.

They look up at one another, he from beneath his eyebrows, Kol from under the disorderly bangs.

"Nik," he says with perfect sincerity. "Don't do it. I haven't got a plan yet, but you know me, I always like to think on my feet. Then it's a surprise for everyone. I don't want to, but I will kill you. Unpleasantly." He leans back. The bat is once more lifted over his shoulder. "Anyway, nice seeing you. I expect Elijah will try to cajole me round for tea on Monday. If I have nothing better to ruin, I'll be here. Until then, darling," he says, and then simply turns round, and flounces off as though he expects to simply waltz out, leaving in his wake a knock-kneed reverence for his petty threats.

He rises slowly, adjusting his cravat.

He flips the pad shut over the smudged drawing, and smiling, lowers his head a bit so as to clearly indicate that it is he who looks down over the rabble; the rabble do not condescend to him.

"Ah; the knight and his white horse. I don't think it particularly suits you, mate. And I wonder: are you equally prepared to heft the lance in defense of your…what would we call him? I don't think 'conquest' is quite the proper term here now, is it? No; this is something more."

Kol has stopped just within the doorway, his shoulders tense.

"It'd be a shame for him to come all the way from Killarney to die a sad miserable death in this city where opportunity abounds for anyone young and strong enough to take hold of it. What terrible news to send home to his mother, if, of course, she weren't already dead."

Kol turns back to him, his jaw under careful control, the eyes unreadable, but, ah, dear brother, in that alone can so much be traced back to the sad and flimsy heart. "You think I don't know everything about you?" he whispers, coming out now from behind his desk, at this precise moment when he must be felt, not as something distantly threatening, but a tangible presence beneath which the nape and spine cower. In threatening there is an advancement; not a crass, rushed thing, but rather a smooth glide down the landing, with a pause at each step for the petrified victim to process the approach, for his instincts to stiffen, to cry out, to bade him flee as his legs comprehend with their own rude intelligence, far older than this easily wooed thing, the mind, that he has at his back a locked door, and at his front Death, which never has been denied. "You think I'm put off by the careful little distance between you, that I think he's just another employee of Caroline's, on par with Enzo, a pub companion and nothing more?" He takes another step forward. "I see everything, _darling_." He smiles. "There's a rough little nightstand, to the right of the mattress he sleeps on. It has a secondhand copy of Gibbons' 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' on it." He allows the dimples to show now. "I could snuff him out at any moment, and you come in here to threaten me." He is close enough now to clasp the back of the sweating neck, to give it a friendly shake, to press the foreheads together with brotherly tenderness.

Kol grabs the lapels of his jacket and slams him back into the desk.

He goes down spluttering; the sketchpad is upended, and slops its loose contents messily over the floor.

They have set into one another with teeth and fists when Elijah appears, filmily, at the edge of his peripheral vision, and begins to roar for them to stop; a distant thunder, in which he is uninterested. He punches Kol in the mouth.

But they are evenly matched in strength and dirty tricks, and as boys used to often wrestle to a draw; Kol rolls him over, and, straddling his chest, knocks his head against the edge of the desk in a shower of stars; the ceiling and floor for a moment swap in a red swirling; he bites Kol's hand.

They have negotiated one another into the corner of his office, and are exchanging punches when Elijah inserts himself bodily, and physically knocking Kol backward, out of the range of his fists, barks, "Niklaus! Kol! _Stop_."

Kol swipes at his bleeding nose; he shakes out his swollen left hand.

"What the _hell_ is all this?" Elijah demands. "Are you civilized men or barnyard animals?"

"I'm offended you're even bothering to ask," Kol says, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the floor. "I haven't done anything to deserve an epithet like 'civilized'. Nik was the one who started it, after all."

"Kol's in love with a dock laborer!" he snaps, and to have it spat out so plainly clearly unsettles his brother, who stops snuffling the blood from his nostrils and stares at them both for a moment with a look of plain distress, as though they've just accused him of something terrible.

Elijah backs away slowly, groping after the desk chair; he sinks heavily into it. "Is he…literate?"

Kol defends himself with a somewhat delayed, "I'm not in love with him."

"Kol Mikaelson," Elijah says, fisting one hand shakily in front of his mouth. "Have you even asked this man if he can _read_? Do you know the average literacy rate-"

"And he's Catholic," he butts in once more before Kol can even attempt a rebuttal.

"A Catholic," Elijah responds woodenly, with glassy eyes bringing his hand down to the desk, and nervously fussing over the lay of its contents.

"Please, Elijah," Kol says, spitting another clot onto the carpet. "Let's not pretend to any religious standards in this family. _Mother_ was a Protestant, and she's dead, so I think we can drop all pretenses of anything remotely resembling piety."

"That doesn't answer my question."

Kol turns about, wiping at his mouth, and in his poorly-feigned indifference heaving about him all sorts of tells which even Elijah can pick up on. "Actually, Elijah, just the other night I spent all our time together helping him stumble through the alphabet instead of sucking his cock. And after that there were the lice to deal with; you know how poor people can't stand things like hygiene or basic education. Thank God we the privileged few have our lofty ideals of incest and extramarital affairs to distinguish us from the herd." He collects his bat and salutes with it. "Nik. It hasn't been a privilege, but then it never is."

"Let him go." Elijah sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose as Kol stomps like a child from the office. "You've upset him."

"He _threatened_ me. He came poncing in here with his little bat-"

"And I'm sure you, the innocent bystander, were utterly shocked and appalled."

He doesn't appreciate your _tone_ , brother.

"Niklaus," Elijah says once more as he makes for the door.

" _Fine_!" he snaps, and storms off in a different direction.

* * *

Caroline is devastated about his face, naturally.

"What the _hell_ were the two of you fighting over?" she demands, half-rising from her chair and allowing the almanac in her lap to slip to the floor.

"Who was he fighting?" Enzo asks, twisting round in his own chair to give him a meditative squint.

"Klaus. You can tell by his shirtsleeves."

"How-" Enzo begins to ask, and setting down the bat beside the door, he cuts him off, ruffling up his hair in agitation. "Do you know where Tim is? I swung round his flat and he wasn't there."

"He probably ran screaming into the night because you randomly showed up on his doorstep armed and with your face covered in blood. You look like a lunatic. Will you please sit down so I can clean up your face?"

"Listen, darling, I don't have time for cute banter or to be de-lunaticed. Nik has a bit of a vested interest in murdering him. And we all know how stubborn Nik can be where murder is concerned."

She takes up the almanac and tapping it against one palm says, "Hmm. What a tragedy that Tim isn't a heavily armed 6'4" former stowaway who came to London with about three pence in his pocket and somehow managed not to die in some of the city's worst districts. If only he weren't so helpless." The almanac is returned to its former place with perfect tranquility, as if Tim is a cucumber sandwich which may or may not have been given its proper allotment of cream cheese; it's hardly any concern of hers. "He's tracking down some information on a client of mine. I'll let Charlie know to find him and warn him, ok? Just take a deep breath. Into your room. Go!"

* * *

"You think our Tim can face down the beast?" Enzo asks with lowered voice as she slips into a jacket, and, bundling a sack of clothing under her arm, flips her curls out from beneath the collar.

"Oh, no; I don't think he has a chance against Klaus. I just said that to calm Kol down. However, I do happen to know somehow who _does_ have a chance against him. Will you take Kol out to look for Tim? I don't want him pacing around the apartment. I have a new tea set that I just freaking _know_ is going to be the first victim." She grabs the jackknife from the mantel and pockets it.

Enzo leans back against the fireplace with his arms crossed. "Caroline-"

"Nope! No protests. I'll be fine. This is just in case I'm too late and I have to stab him for making Kol sad."

* * *

Elijah has nattered him into the library, where he seeks his refuge in the armchair, and the bits of Sappho upon which he has been sharpening his Greek.

But upon entering the room, he stops with his hand on the door.

Caroline has contrived to occupy the chair first, and sits with her legs primly crossed in their dark trousers, the hair down about her shoulders.

The human race has sequestered up its sleeve nothing his ancestor has not already flapped about, and recorded proudly in his literature, so that in future all may marvel, and strive only to be so clever.

But she always has something new, hasn't she?

He shuts the door. "How did you get in here?"

"I was the servant you just passed in the hall. The one you ordered to bring your brandy to the library?" She swings the top leg, bouncing her foot, both her hands resting placidly on the armrests, not a curl daring to frizz rebelliously and so upset the aesthetic she has conjured.

He clasps his hands behind his back and dimples, somewhat helplessly, yes, but, ah, even our chinks may be many-bladed, and flense both wielder and invader. Perhaps he flatters himself (though you will find this rarely to be the case), but the lady hardly doth protest her indifference, hmm?

"I have something to discuss with you," she says before he can open his mouth once more. "Tim O'Sullivan is my employee, which means he's under my protection. If something were to happen to him, I'd feel obliged to completely annihilate whoever was responsible for such an unfortunate situation."

"Ah." He nods without dropping his smile. "But haven't you already promised to do so? So what motivation would anyone perhaps with an interest in Tim's welfare and how quickly this cruel world ceases to look out for it have for reconsideration?"

Caroline has studied at the hearths of harsh men, and knows how she must tilt the head, and ice the eyes, so that one is looking not at a woman but rather Diana with impartially sighted bow, she of sleek white limb and fair cheek, who has disguised herself as prey and reveals herself in those woodland mists which come too late upon the wanderer. To see the virginal shroud lift its pall of frill and lace, and char the gentle apple-skin of the cheeks-quite a sight.

She stands without looking away from him, which is quite right, sweetheart.

The legs have uncrossed slowly, with an artist's eye for the gravity of their movement, but she comes to him briskly: here is a woman who knows that the world is to move aside for her, and matches her strides according to its foreseen partings.

He senses she is armed a moment before she reaches for her weapon, and darts out his hand for her wrist-

But the small body slams him back into the door which he has in some earlier daze shut without noticing, and though he touches the skin of her beneath the cuff of her shirt, and latches it in a bruising grip, he has done it a moment too slowly, and the knife is beneath his chin, her hand in his hair, her knee between his legs.

She lets him contemplate this for a moment.

"I am not one of your lackeys. And I am not one of your victims. And neither are any of my friends. What you like best is to live, and rub it in everyone's faces. But you are not as big as the stories you tell yourself. And you are not going to punish Kol, for moving on without you."

There are silences which can be heard, and so one rises between them now, airing all the grievances of the places where their bodies touch, and are not allowed to carry on further. He can feel the heart beating in her: such a little thing, love, to impel you all the way here, into the wolf's maw.

He smiles, and licks his lips.

He lowers his chin so that the knife parts the soft flesh beneath it, not seriously, no, he eases them both into this, so that she has time to see the sudden rippling of his blood and the quivering of the skin where it has been unexpectedly violated, and flinches back.

What does he not understand about humans? There is in each of them various degrees of mettle, and the situations in which they choose to deploy it. You have done remarkably, love; but he knows the things to which you can bring yourself, and the things which you cannot.

She pulls the knife away before he can impale himself on it. He keeps hold of her wrist.

"I thought so, sweetheart," he whispers into her ear, letting his breath land hot on its opening, so that the inner hairs can vibrate in great discomfit, and throw the rest of her into proper discord. "You do not tell me how to govern my own family."

She has lowered the knife; but she has not removed her knee, and presses it now sharply into him, not so that he is incapacitated, no, she has more finesse than that, she wants him to listen, to bend his knee, to understand that there are degrees to which she can hurt him, and she has only yet breached the most superficial of them. A little shock of pain reaches into his spine, and flees downward to his knees, and making water of them, buckles him into her arms.

She holds him up by the hair. "They are not yours to _govern_ , Klaus, that is the whole freaking _problem_ with you. They are _people_. They are not plots, they are not toys, they are not something that has some place on your chess board and you just have to figure out where they go. Kol misses you. He would come _back_ to you, if you even tried to deserve it. "

Careful, sweetheart.

Caroline, Caroline, Caroline, he thinks, looking up into her eyes; incensed crusader of every downtrodden but herself. Society has spat on her at every turn, and only marginally welcomed her into its fringes, when it has need of her, and can justify in some small measure its clemency toward this queer woman and her unfeminine superiority of intellect. And she concerns herself over some singular man, with enough money to buy off God and Parliament.

He does not insult her with his usual doe-eyed prevarication; a lesser man, with his human fondness for beauty and his blind faith in its integrity, might take in the carefully seen-to curls, and the blue eyes, and see in them some stamp of the cherub, which Nature, being naturally infallible, would never have pasted over an imp.

But she is no lesser man.

He darts out his hands for the lapels of her coat; the knee has time only for a reactive twitch, but it puts him on his own knees nevertheless.

He keeps hold of the coat, so that she falls with him.

They land eye to eye; in her heeled boots, she is nearly of a height: but here in this intimacy of the shared breath and the crushed chests, he has her by a good few inches. It blazes in her face; what are her usual interlocutors but mere worms, who have looked down on her in ignorance, from those heights to which their gilded genitalia have entitled them?

But he is hardly her usual interlocutor. And no one, love, says to him, "Here is the way of it" when _he_ sets forth what the smallest pickpocket shall steal, and the queen sign.

She tries to break free, but one never does that with him; if kings are not excused from his web, neither shall she be casually loosed. He grips her about the shoulders; he can feel, in the throat, in the soft breast beneath the coat, how the heart beats, so _frantically_ , love, yes, now-now, do we begin to understand. He may have in the deepest recesses of him some surprising fondness; there is no wonder in that; rarely does he cross swords with any opponent half so well-armed. But he is no man, and he will not come to heel like one. Perhaps that Enzo chap, with all his innumerable workhouses bristling in his heart, has put his neck gratefully beneath her boot, in exchange for anything. But, ah, Caroline. No stalwart prince has ever smote the goblin king so handily.

"Tell my brother," here he licks his lips, and smiles, close to her ear, "that he may take his little boyfriend, and run, if he likes."

"No," Caroline replies distinctly, with no tremor in her voice. And reaching round his waist, softly, as a lover might, with that yearning tenderness of a new discovery, she digs her fingers into a bruise Kol left with one of his elbows.

She shoves him away from her.

For a moment the room is eclipsed by a white curtain; holding his side, he staggers to his feet in time for the mists to clear, for his eyes to focus, for him to witness her kick over the chair she has vacated, and snatch from underneath it the revolver affixed to the bottom.

She levels it at him.

For a moment, both freeze.

But have we not already seen, and accepted, Caroline sweetheart, how this little standoff shall end? Some hearts are just too soft; logic has tried, with all its considerable resources, to make of them its idle playthings, to be put aside once they become an obstruction.

But you are only a woman with all the tender instincts of her gender, impelled to help all her fellow creature man, be he deserving or not.

"I told you to leave Kol alone," she says. "I don't ask twice."

He smiles; whatever she pretends, she has never been impervious to this, like any common man or woman before her. He links his hands behind his back. "Come now, love," he says, softly, softly.

She stares unwavering at him.

She shoots him.

* * *

Tim is located some time later in a pub down Southwark, drinking beer in his shirtsleeves, with the battered coat draped over his knees.

Their reunion is quite touching.

"Where the hell have you been?" he demands as he and Enzo muscle roughly into the crowd of drunken sailors with the help of a few precisely-timed elbows. "We've been all over London looking for you."

"Oh, don't you start with me," Tim says. "Charlie's only been by half an hour before to tell me youse was out looking for me, and I've sat meself down here ever since. And who the fuck was after wearing the face off you? Did you deserve it, or is it avenging you I'm needing to be?"

"Will you avenge me either way?" he asks.

"Probably."

"Gentlemen," Enzo says. "Shall we adjourn to Baker Street before Caroline wears the face off us all for leaving her hanging over Tim's fate?"

"Why is my fate in doubt?" Tim wants to know.

"I'll explain later, darling. I punched another man in the face over you today. Does that give you a bit of a thrill?"

"I'm all aflutter."

Enzo, collecting the coat from Tim's knees, herds them both toward the door like unruly children, or cats. "Come along, gentlemen. You can ask Caroline for his hand once we're back in Baker Street."

* * *

Caroline gives up the Whitechapel flat and begins taking clients once more; he is regaled with any number of theories and complaints on this Ripper chap at all hours of the afternoon when he is trying to sleep.

"Don't let my closed eyes put you off, darling," he tells her, inserting cotton wool into his ears. "I'm not napping, only absorbing this terribly interesting conversation."

She throws a shoe at him.

Nik is ominously absent. This has never heralded anything pleasant for man or beast; he cannot be blamed for a general increase in twitchiness. If a shadow can comfortably accommodate a man, Nik will store himself in it; and if it cannot, he'll have corrupted some organ grinder's monkey, and set it lurking with a knife. Tim, however, having endured nearly a week of finding himself suddenly yanked from the path of any strange passersby, be they children or rozzers, takes out his cigarette during one evening stroll, and, lighting it so that in the interim he may have a moment to think, says to him, "Sure I'm not so delicate as you may think. I think that wee girl mightn't have the better of me too quickly."

"I just think you might watch yourself more closely. Keep an eye on everything."

"In case your brother's stuffed himself into those wee bits of stocking and is about to send me topside with the ribbon from his hair?"

"I don't think you're nearly as funny as you think you are. You don't know what Nik's capable of."

"Ah, give it a moment. I'm only saying would you please take the stick out of your English backside and think to yourself, 'Anyway, he's a good half a foot on me soft eejit brother with his cushy aristocrat hands what never touched a single crate in their pampered lives.' I work the docks, lad. You think I haven't seen a dust-up in me day? I didn't break these knuckles hoisting me tea cup."

"Nik isn't some sailor you can knock about the jaw till he slinks away in reluctant defeat. No offense, darling, but you're overestimating yourself a bit. I just don't want to see it get you stabbed somewhere fatal but agonizingly slow."

Tim blows a stream of smoke, unimpressed with his own mortality. "Tisn't meself I'm so confident in, it's our Caroline. If she's put me under her wing I figure I'm safe as a babe in one of your fancy country houses. Any man has any wee bit of sense knows to be properly terrified of her, and your man supposedly has a brain what like she got. So anyway, if and he has kitted himself out like that wisp o' lass, I expect she'll be along presently with stick in hand. Sure I'm looking forward to it." He flicks the cigarette and smiles.

* * *

There is inevitably some period of adjustment in order for things to fall back into their usual groove. Caroline will blame him for any bumps along the way, but he is only trying to live out his best and handsomest years under the thumb of a despot, and ought to be afforded some leniency; without leniency, darling, he tells her one evening when she has once again laid down some ridiculous edict about discharging weapons in the flat, the peasants riot. Often with fire.

"You will _not_ set anymore fires," she says, unfairly. He has only set three this year, and no animals were harmed in the making of them. There was one rather dead man, but that was his own fault, for trying to shoot Caroline, and not getting the petrol off his clothes in time. You can't let that set in; any Elijah will tell you that. Stains horribly.

On one miserable night when the wind has come howling up to their windows, and at finding them shut turns, in a fury, on the gas jets struggling beneath the fogs, she walks past his fiddlings at the workbench and stops in the act of tying on his muffler (something unfortunate happened to her own during a wager with Tim) to ask him, "Is that what I think it is?"

"It depends upon what you think this is," he replies, bending over his work with a gentle frown; a vigorous one will ruin his brow, and then Bekah will never let him live it down. He has decided at all costs to pocket and humanity that he will see that she gets her first wrinkle before him; he has already bestowed the first frosts on Elijah's hair after all, and Bekah is far easier to ruffle.

"What did I say about making bombs in the house?"

"You said not to do it." He makes an adjustment, scratching his chin.

She lets out his favourite long-suffering sigh. She has a very nice long-suffering sigh; if he had one of those silly conscience things he'd even wake to it, and beg her pardon. "It's not for me."

"Oh, I'm sorry; I missed the part where I said 'Kol, no more building bombs in the flat unless they aren't for your own personal use'. Listen, I don't want to be a bitch-"

"Yes, you do. You like it."

"-and rain on your parade and everything, but I also need you to understand that you are building an explosive next to several highly unstable chemicals."

"Well, that was very irresponsible of you to just leave them out, now, wasn't it?"

And now for a moment he can hear in the straining of her voice that she is trying not to laugh; it's hard not to be charmed by him; one can't blame her. "Who are you building it for?"

"Tim."

"Do you know something else he might like? I hear there are these things called 'books' that he's kind of fond of."

"He doesn't like it when I buy him things. I gave him a copy of Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' and he made a fuss till I told him I'd stole it from Elijah's personal library."

She finishes with the muffler, pulling it up over her mouth. "Did you?"

"Of course."

"So let me get this straight: giving him something you bought with hard-earned...with earned money is offensive to his ethics, but stolen property-that's perfectly fine."

"He doesn't much like any of my family, so I don't think he minds if it's stolen from them. Anyway, he's Irish; you know how they feel about blowing things up. I thought this would be an appropriate alternative to buying him something."

"Kol! That's racist."

"It isn't racist if they want to sleep with you, darling." He looks up at last from his work and, leaning back in his chair, puts his boots up on the table, surveying her coat and trousers. "Where are you off to on a shit night light this?"

"A torso showed up by the Thames; Lestrade wants me to help identify it. They've found a few other parts they think might belong to the same body. I'll probably be back late. _Don't_ blow up the house."

"Are you sleeping any better?"

"Sleep is for the weak and for people who don't have a murderer to catch," she says crisply, adjusting the muffler a little. "You know me, I can function just fine on only a couple of hours."

"You'll kill yourself. And then I'll have to answer to Enzo."

"I'll be fine, mother." And so saying, she sweeps out of the flat.

And because he knows she will forgo the cabs, and proceed on foot through some of the worst districts to absorb her fellow man in his less compassionate acts, trusting on her wits to keep her from dismemberment, he waits till she is out of earshot, and strapping on his guns, puts on the coat over them with a grimace at the window, which gleefully displays the evening's sullen fits.

There are some men bedded down amongst their starched sheets, with the gas jet hissing over their book, and their bellies distended with tea.

* * *

On a typical night can be found Caroline's collection of men sitting round the flat playing patience (or footsie under the table, but who wants to hear about that till someone has their cock in hand) and subtly* judging whatever smutty laundry a client has currently aired.

*Some people (Caroline) have informed him that he has no earthly concept of this word, but anyway, it's his turn to talk now, darling, and he stands by his conduct.

October has announced itself most brutally, and in grim apparel arrives bearing the sort of mists which kill consumptives and ground ships; the youngest of bones, still green with their first summers, feel death in them. You can huddle beneath the coziest blanket, and consume every steaming mug put into your hand (Caroline will not abide the thought of her boys being inadequately cared for by their own hands), and still remember the graveyards in state of moss and mold, whiling away their trees till the coldest nights, when the beggars are sickest, and the rich men grimmest. There's nothing for it, of course, but for him to share a chair with Tim while they fight over elbow space at table, where he has spread his sketches for a diving suit.

Caroline has adjourned to the far corner with a stack of newspapers.

Enzo is fussing with a wig affixed to the knob at the top of a dressmaker's mannequin, for some inexplicable reason.

"Can you please explain this? I can't even concentrate on my flirting."

"He's training to fix a lady's hair," Caroline says distractedly, without looking up from her newspapers. She folds one over her knee. "I'm having him practice on a wig before he does my own."

"I can do your hair; Bekah used to make me dress hers all the time when we were little. We had to play 'maid and lady'; I won't even snip off a bit of yours."

She turns the paper again, rubbing her chin. "It's not for me. I have a case; I need a lady's maid that I trust."

"You really need to stop taking on jobs that involve dressing Enzo as a woman, darling; it just doesn't work. He's hideous. I can get you half a dozen men who would carry it off much better, and they're all adept at wearing dresses already, so that's that out of the way."

"Can I trust them the way I trust Enzo?"

"No, of course not; they're my acquaintances. When have I ever associated with anyone trustworthy? That would be boring. Anyway, how in the hell do you expect to pass off Enzo as a maid?"

"Well, the woman's blind as a fucking bat," Enzo puts in, taking the comb with great panache to the cluster of gingery curls spilling over the mannequin's wooden shoulders. "So that ought to help."

They return to their respective tasks; the lamps hiss steadily; the wind begs after admission. Somewhere below is the clopping of a cabbie plying his bitter trade. On the mantel, the clock shows fifteen after ten.

He feels, on his neck, where humans first sense foul winds, a subtle tingling, and flinches against it. The graveyards have got at him too, and from their crypts sent all manner of howlings to tremble his manly resolve, or whatever it is Nik calls it. There are some crying outs which you cannot hear, and wish you could; you can conceptualize a tangible sound, and attribute it to some distant building spire, which the wind has caught hold of, and shaped itself a voice from the textured slopes.

"You're really going to go underwater in this?" Tim asks him, tapping the sketches before them.

He startles from his strange reverie, which anyway is the domain of men who cannot separate their penny novels from the firm thigh pressed against their own. "There have been similar suits used before, for salvaging ships and that sort of thing. There were two French brothers who built one similar to this in 1878. I've made some adjustments to their design. I want to tweak it a bit more, then I'll find someone who can build it. I thought I might do some of it myself, though."

"I can help you with some of that, if you can get your hands on the materials."

"Can you?"

"Sure I'm a fair hand with metals; I worked on a few ships in Belfast before I came here."

Someone rings at the door downstairs; Caroline stiffens.

Enzo continues playing with his wig. "Probably that man what wanted you to help him off the maid he put his slag bun in. I'll knock him down again for you, gorgeous. Didn't rattle anything hard enough last night, I suppose. Sometimes you can't tell with toffs. You've got some run away at the first hint they might get a thrashing, and some like our man here can take a hell of a whipping."

"Literally," he throws in out of habit, making an adjustment to the sketch, and lifting an eyebrow at Tim in search of approval as the client is admitted and mounts the steps.

Caroline sits perfectly still in her chair, newspaper forgotten in her lap. "It isn't a client," she says quietly, and moves her hands to the armrests, so she has something to grip.

"Mr. Mikaelson here to see you, Mrs. Forbes," Mrs. Hudson announces, admitting them both after a brief knock. She is clearly enamored of Nik, as are most people privy to his manners and dimples; you don't have to fear him, if he doesn't want you to.

Nik enters with a sling on his arm and rather a lot of stars in his eyes.

He looks at Caroline; the rest of them are only so much rubbish.

"Hello, mate," Enzo says cheerfully. "I see someone gave you what for. I'd make some pithy comment about what the other man must look like, but I've been punched by you; I've had better."

Nik ignores him. He has something in his good hand; he sets it on the table with uncalled for drama, drawing out the motion, so that everyone is sure to follow the entire thing through to its completion; he can never just do something and see himself out, Nik.

"I brought you something."

"That's nice," Caroline says.

She means it dismissively, but neither of them look away from one another; you could cut through this interaction. He thinks of interfering; he has never liked the look in Nik's eyes; still less does he like the one in Caroline's. But you can never talk Nik out of someone, once he's put down roots, and there is consideration to be taken over the fact that he is sitting on the knee of a man Nik threatened not ten days ago, quite frothily.

"I have a contact at Broadmoor who was able to get me a copy of some rather interesting case files. I thought it might help you in your continued observations of the criminal mind." He takes his hand off the book slowly, with great gravity. He might be bestowing a knighthood.

"Good night, Caroline," he says, with an alarming sort of tenderness, and having not so much as acknowledged the rest of them, sees himself out.

"What the hell was that about?" Enzo asks, leaving off the wig at last and pouring himself another splash of tea from the kettle.

She relaxes slowly, in little increments that push her back into the chair, the newspaper crackling on her lap. "He has a sling on his arm because I shot him, and now he thinks we're engaged or something."

* * *

Caroline cannot abide the unknown; there are no mysteries, only human failings.

And so she paces the flat, taking only a bit of toast with her tea, and forgetting that so too must she lay her pretty bones down to sleep.

Enzo catches her in a half-faint one evening, as she is crossing the sitting room to fetch down an encyclopedia; she is nagged into some beef tea with only a few white-lipped protestations.

Come the next morning, she is back to devotedly wearing down the heels of her slippers, and mumbling over soil samples.

* * *

When the lamplighter steps drearily along, and the fogs on behalf of London declare independence from neighboring England, so that The Great Wen is unto itself a solitary world, drowsily muzzled, he tells Caroline, "You have to be wrong occasionally, darling; otherwise you might become insufferable, like my sister."

She is standing before the fire.

She has wound over her hands the muffler he 'bought' her to replace the one he and Tim handily dispatched of, owing to a sudden and unexpected proliferation of fire; she wraps and unwraps it round her chapped knuckles, which she has neglected like all the other vital bits of her. From the chair where he is sitting, he stretches out his foot to prod her in the calf swimming about somewhere beneath her skirt.

"It's not about being right," she says quietly, and looks at him with a thing he saw on her face when that Matt chap was still raw in her, and he realised, with a vast sinking inside him, that he loved her the way he wanted his siblings to love him, and did not, and discovering in her pain something he could not burn, or break, but wanted to, he knew that death and love must be things not so very far removed after all: and there can be in neither of them the satisfaction of bearing more grief to mortals untold. "It's just...if I don't care about more than the headlines their deaths make, will anyone? They're just prostitutes. That's what people will go back to thinking, when they get over the violence of his crimes. That's what they care about; not the women, but some lurking bogeyman who might unpredictably widen his hunting grounds, because he's something they can't explain, can't understand, can't... _reconcile_ with the society they think they have. The don't want to catch a murderer: they want to expose a legend. They want to go back to sleeping at night."

He gets out of his chair.

Nik taught him to hesitate whenever he reaches for anyone; sometimes they are knocked out of your arms (they cannot be knocked out of your heart); he has not unlearned that. He will never unlearn that.

But he does bring her into his arms, and resting his chin on her head, and then his cheek, says into her hair, "We weren't all put on this earth for you to look after us, darling."

And she smiles, and relaxes back into him, in a way that Bekah used to do, before Father taught her, Mother taught her, Nik taught her, all along down the line of dismal tutors: we do not love, not like that. "I really intensely disagree with that," she chirps, and taps him on the end of the nose with her finger.

* * *

In the meantime he is not about to choke up over this Jack chap's present lack of apprehension; a conscience and all its attendant griefs are all fine and well if they don't disturb one's complexion, but he's a blotchy crier.

And anyway, he finds that conscience thing tends to interfere with his carousing.

He takes Enzo and Tim to see Jenny Hill at the London Pavillion, and they stagger into Baker Street full of champagne to serenade Caroline with a rendition of 'The Boy I Love Is in the Gallery' that would send the wakeful dead howling out of their graves without Tim's tenor to smooth it out. The Hat is then duly confiscated from Tim, and thrown at the window till Caroline opens it.

She tries to persuade some of the idiocy out of them: "Shh! Everybody come up the stairs quietly, without waking Mrs. Hudson, and they can have biscuits."

But she is trying not to laugh, and that rather muffs up the whole affair.

"The boy that I love, they call him a cobbler!" he sings (Tim says this is rather a mild term for the violence he does to a key), and throws the hat again.

"They call him a docker," Enzo corrects, less wobbly than either of them; he has seen many a pub frequenter drunk under the table on an off day of Enzo's, which reminds him: he ought to drop this fact casually into the lap of Nik, who holds his liquor like a lady, and once, having been talked into half a bottle of wine by some silver-tongued toff (you may guess who), threw up all over the third course of a dinner party in honour of one lord or another.

* * *

Nik lies quietly, nursing his wound (or perhaps masturbating over it; you can never tell with him): Rebekah, of course, has never heard of any such thing as discretion, and sniffing in Caroline a rival for the affections of Nik, begins to occupy the flat with alarming frequency.

"Don't you have another husband to disappear under mysterious circumstances?" he asks, flicking the jacknife between his fingers (Caroline made some noise about it being in the mantel again; he doesn't understand women either).

The clients continue to experience such disorientation over the notion of a woman openly trying her hand at something which necessitates the perusing of sections of the paper not wholly devoted to Society and its latest Brouhahas that they address themselves to him. One particularly fussed man interrupts their breakfast one morning by banging open the door and insinuating himself, wild-eyed, into the flat.

There is some blinking for a moment; decidedly less from Enzo, who won't be roused from his bacon for anything less than a command from Caroline, or a fire, in that precise order.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Forbes!" the man cries out, making direct for his chair. "You musn't blame me. I am nearly mad. Mr. Forbes, I am the unhappy John Hector McFarlane."

Caroline pours from the silver tea service into a clean mug. "You better sit down and have some tea, Mr. McFarlane. You're going to have to tell me exactly who you are, and what you want. You told us your name like we're supposed to know it, but aside from the fact that you're a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an asthmatic, I don't know anything about you."

Enzo puts some bacon into the astonished man's hand.

* * *

Caroline dispatches with another few cases in a matter of days. Sometimes a client has barely had out their narrative by the time she is nodding sagely, with the fingertips under her nose, and the solution already bright in her eyes.

But the Whitechapel case continues to elude her, and slice off bits of her shapeliness, so that the collarbones day by day are newly sharpened, and the cheekbones rise as if from their sickbed.

On a drizzly Thursday afternoon while they are properly arming themselves against the weather for a jaunt into Whitechapel, an insurrection is mounted: three pieces of toast minimum, and the entire plate of devilled kidneys Mrs. Hudson has been kind enough to provide for the occasion before anyone steps so much as a toe outside the flat.

"I don't have time. I'll get something from a street vendor," she says, pulling her muffler up to her nose.

"I didn't want to have to do this, darling," he says.

On his gesture, Tim and Enzo each grab her by an arm and heave her onto the sofa; Enzo sits on her. "Sorry, gorgeous."

She summons more colour into her cheeks than he has seen for weeks, but unsurprisingly neglects to dislodge 190 pounds of ex-Army boxing champion.

The toast and kidneys are eaten.

She proceeds them crabbily into the Underground, making a Herculean effort to not be placated by Enzo's cheerful prattling; he pinches her on the leg when they all squeeze in next to each other until she is too irritated to ignore him any further.

In Whitechapel, she returns to her natural state of military being, and begins to bark orders with her old chirpiness: "All of the murders have been clustered around either side of Whitechapel Rd. and Commercial St., so I want this place thoroughly turned upside down. I want you to pay attention to everyone; this man is keeping trophies, and he wouldn't do that unless he wanted to keep reliving his kills. There's a good chance he returns to the sites. There's also a good chance he lives in or regularly frequents the surrounding areas; he's killing here because he knows this area well, this is his comfort zone. Tim, Kol, I want you to head back toward the club where Elizabeth Stride was found. Enzo, with me. Report back here in an hour with any observations, and then I'll give you your next instructions. Right now we just want to get the lay of the land in daylight."

The only thing humanity likes more than a tragedy is the ability to capitalize on it, and the usual parasitic denizens have emerged in force to funnel any sightseers into their pockets; as they head off in the direction Caroline indicates, he and Tim are swarmed by costermongers offering them snacks and householders peddling 'but a pittance' in admittance fees to windows overlooking the murder sites. They are splashed by passing omnibuses overflowing with slumming gentlemen and ladies touring the atrocities as if they are this Season's newest and creamiest debutantes.

He eyes up an unattended cab, then turns to Tim. "You know, I think we could give rather a better tour than any of these other companies. They lack a certain...spark. No originality."

"They don't have that certain extra something two half-mad sods can offer them."

"Exactly," he says, and climbs up onto the box. "Well, Tim-let the people know they've come to the right place."

Tim sweeps off his hat. "Six pence, ladies and gentlemen! Six pence only for the original Jack the Ripper tour. See the leather apron itself!"

He's coming along nicely.

In no time at all, they've a full cab; Tim steps up beside him, and he touches up the horses. "If you'll look to the left," he says to an elderly matron trying to pare back the decades with an apple green concoction best left to maidens thirty years younger, with all their hair, "you can see one of the famous alleys where Catherynne Eddowes used to fuck her clients against the wall."

He whips the horses up to breakneak speed, scattering pedestrians with frantic shouts.

* * *

Caroline is somewhat displeased that they have neglected their duties to run a fake tour company which a nearby police vehicle found itself obliged to chase upon hysterical entreaty by one of the customers, but that sounds like a her problem.

Next morning, shortly after Tim arrives for his daily assignment, he takes up a blow-pipe from the mantel and, waiting for her to turn her back to him, he puffs an accurate breath into it.

"Kol!" she slurs on her way to the floor; a startled Tim catches her halfway down, one hand cradling her head so it doesn't bump the nearby armchair.

"What the fuck was that?" he blurts out, trying to wrangle her deadweight.

"It's a blow-pipe from an earlier case. It belonged to some man who wasn't English, so I suppose we'd call him some sort of savage. She kept it as a souvenir; I had some new darts fashioned for it the other day. It's only a sedative." He returns the blow-pipe to the mantel. "Take her arms," he says, picking up the other end of her by the calves. "I'd really have made an excellent doctor," he points out as they shuffle into the bedroom with her swaying between them.

* * *

He drugs her tea three nights in a row before she finally gives up and settles back into a normal bedtime routine, with sleeping and everything. She is undoubtedly smarter than him; but she cannot outwit him in something like this.

* * *

 _In 1852, the Law left Dickens' pen in such state: 'The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.'_

 _But I am not so lurid. And though we have met at crossroads and each decided to go our separate ways, down paths the other neither dares nor desires to walk, I have no particular ire for the Law, and no poetic fire in depicting it._

 _Nevertheless, a word._

 _1666 claimed one of its greatest victims in the medieval courthouse of the Old Bailey when it sent its flames to deconstruct 127 years of Proceedings. In its perpetration, a crime is solid; it has a victim, it has a perpetrator; to he who has already lost all, and to he who, but for the mercy of the Jury, may yet lose all, it has become the central event from which all the other branches of his personal narrative are merely digressions. And yet at the culmination of three days, it was only so much ash, like most human suffering._

 _In 1673, the Old Bailey entered its second form: a three-storey Italianate brick building propped up by doric columns, with one side of the courtroom open to the weather. This was in order to introduce fresh air to the gaol fever then rampant among the prisoners; let not that black hand of infection claim the judges in state at their benches, nor the balconies full of court officers and aristocratic watchers. We can stack men like poorly-set cargo, feed him gruel, deny him light, abandon him in such a state till we are finally of a mind to decide his culpability, but let not the men who have condemned him take their chances among the diseases of the lower order. They are only following Procedure; and Procedure can never be a moral indictment of the men who scrupulously adhere to it, no matter how poorly or stupidly it be enforced without consideration for the individual matter: for how can they be responsible for a rule which their ancestors set down, and which they have always followed, and which they are expected to follow now, unquestioningly? Can we ask of him to supplant Expectation-do we require him to upset Society; must we really think he can, as one man, or even the multiple-can he, can they, upset the entire firmament, and all before afternoon tea? Madness.  
But in 1737, Old Bailey was remodelled, and this time enclosed; and in consequence Typhus, mistaking the Lord Mayor and two judges for those well-deserving impoverished who have not the sense to earn enough to cover doctor and bread, killed three of the Law's noble implements (and some fifty besides, but never mind that lot). There followed the distribution of nosegays and aromatic herbs which you can see to this day, for disease is only a thing to combat when its victims have the prosperity to be labelled as men rather than cattle. Human cattle are easily bred, and hardly edible, besides. _

_A number of improvements in 1774, 1787, and 1824 have crowned the court in the little appliques you can now see in our current era: the four brass chandeliers, council's semi-circular mahogany table, the fireplace with its mosaic in the Lord Mayor's Dining Room, a Turkey carpet the prisoner's basement would gladly kill (another) man over. In acquiescence to a flourishing need driven by more trials and impatient spectators, a second courtroom was built, and then a third, and a fourth; the latter is a cramped affair, with only a gangway for the public, and enough space between accused and council for an atrocious mismanagement of one's elbows which at any table of Elijah's would have you thrown out._

 _It is the second courtroom with which we are currently concerned, for it is here Caroline Forbes has seated herself to observe the murder trial of Ruth Newman, child murderess, and it is beside her that He settles himself, minding his healing arm._

 _She stiffens when He slips onto the pew next to her; she has, of course, made note of him the moment he entered the room, with her back to him, and the pre-verdict rumble of the court all round her. I think in any crowd with all its teeming discontent, they would know one another._

 _They sit in silence for some time. I must specify they are silent: but not uncommunicative. There is a rigid awareness in both of the hands which in stilted unease lie on the bench beside one another; neither has yet the courage to cross the barriers which she has erected; neither has yet the courage to retreat in cold denial._

 _He says, when the proceedings have paused, "I've given some thought to what you said. About my family. About Kol. I want to...thank you, for your honesty. I think...perhaps you were right."_

 _It is here she turns to him._

 _It is here she looks at him...she looks at him as he has always wanted to be looked at._

 _Of course I, the humble observer, need not be so modest as He would be, in describing this look, and I can say there was love in it._

 _He wanted there to be love in it._

* * *

November is setting itself up to be a blustery one, and moans round the horse's manes with ill grace. The horses are visibly displeased; but like anyone who makes fuckall for a day's back-breaking labour, have got no say in it.

Caroline has consented to observe the usual nuances of humanity such as breakfast and napping, so he (mostly) leaves off drugging her tea (we can't deny ourselves every amusement). He's afraid he's not got much of interest to disclose; there was the minor international incident, but it was so easy to arrange there's no gain in mentioning it. His handsome face, etc. societal ruin, et. al something something, sexual deviancy.

He is mostly occupied with teaching Tim to cheat at cards, and warming his feet at the fire. This too seems to muss the wind's delicate feelings, and it sends round its offspring to knock up the windows and scream into the chimney.

There is a disagreement over the staging of the Hamlet/Laertes duel, which naturally must be settled like men. Tim arms himself with Caroline's cane; he takes down the spear. Another of Aunt Vespa's vases is sacrificed to the Cause, but he is able to determine that the muscles in Tim's forearms are very impressive, and he assumes Caroline of all people cannot fail to see the merit of this information. She does not seem immediately observant of it; but perhaps that's only because in devoting himself to their argument, Tim found it necessary to climb on the table, and then a grievance was done to the new tea set.

There is a sort of dancing round between them, him and Tim. Throughout the general course of the usual ordinary things like pub brawls and the time they attended one of Paul Cinquecalli's juggling acts as women, he flirts outrageously, and Tim, less deftly, returns it, or rather tries to return it; probably he ought to stick to shooting people in the face, Enzo tells him with fatherly sympathy, patting his back. There is only a bit of snogging, once, when they've some beer in them, and come staggering home to the Baker Street stoop, and there blink at one another for a moment, smiling in dumb acquiescence to the comfort of a full belly, and their own handsomeness. And then Tim takes the lapels of his coat in hand, and lifts him onto his toes.

Slowly, slowly, Tim does it, with the street silent all down the long avenues into the foggy distances where somewhere a lone hoof breaks the massing frosts. Just a shy bit of tongue, and the hands which twist up his coat. He regrets to say there is nothing particularly scandalous in it, but only the ragged aftermath of it, when they breathe into one another as if they have done something of far more thrilling athleticism, resting their foreheads against one another.

Anyway, as you can see, he is all very fine, and handsome.

It all seems to be proceeding quite as usual one afternoon while he and Tim are looking over his sketches, their knees touching beneath the table. Caroline has nipped out for one thing or another, Enzo in tow. The rain has settled in with a sulky air, and seems inclined to stay for the duration of the world, and the fire with weary popping attempts to combat it.

They have got several absent-minded drinks into their tea when he says to Tim, "Does this taste funny to you?"

"What, the tea, or the biscuits?"

"The tea." He swirls it round his mug, eyeing it up. There is an innocuous spot of light in it, from the lamp.

"Not that I notice, so," Tim says, and with complete unconcern, finishes off his own.

* * *

He wakes at table with Elijah and Nik.

"Tea?" Elijah asks in the polished tone which he has tried to inflict upon the rest of them, and managed in varying levels of success between Rebekah and Nik, when they are not murderous.

Beside him, there is a stirring, and a heavily accented summation of the situation in language which makes Elijah cringe.

He turns to see Tim tied to the chair next to him, dressed in a suit.

"Tea?" Nik reiterates, with a lifted brow. "Supper is chicken fricassee. And we have a nice citrus ice." He takes a sip from his wine glass. Elijah with concerning intensity leans forward, elbows clear of the table, and says to Tim, "Do you read?"

"I...who the fuck are you? Yes?"

"Penny dreadfuls," Elijah replies, as if Tim has just spit in his broth, or perhaps dispensed with an even worse bodily excretion.

"Nik," he snaps, "what the hell is this?"

"I thought we should have a nice family supper. I think perhaps it's time you and I attempted to patch things up. What do you say?"

"Where's me gun?" Tim is asking beside him, and whether he means to use it on himself or Nik is not immediately clear. And Nik, with only a little shuddering of this impeccable aristocrat mien which he puts on for the public, and Bekah, when he wants to be particularly insufferable to her, says, "I have very generously invited you to my table, whatever your name is, so why don't we all sit here with a minimum of weaponry and have a nice chat, hmm? I'm sure even in the slums you sometimes have occasion to be well-mannered."

"Not even a bare minimum of thanks, Nik. If you don't mind, we'll be off."

The mien slips; Nik never has been able to maintain it for long. He leans over the table with the full force of his murderous soul in his eyes, and hisses, "Well, isn't that a pity, since the tea which you so carelessly drank in your nice little flat in front of your nice little fire was poisoned, and it just so happens I've the only antidote. Which you will get after we have a nice meal together, as a family."

"I'd rather die, actually. So if you don't mind shutting your face, so I can do it in peace."

Elijah sighs.

Nik sits back with a smirk. "Then your friend here will die as well."

For some time they are engaged in staring at one another.

But it's as he said to Caroline: Nik gets what he wants, always.

"So, Kol's...companion."

"He has a name, Nik. And I know you know it, and everything else besides."

"So, Kol's companion," Nik repeats, like a bitch, "I hear you enjoy Dickens, in between scratching your lice, so that ought to be of some comfort, hmm, brother?" He nudges Elijah. "He is inclined to literature. Of a sort. I personally find Dickens a bit sentimental, for my tastes."

"Quite," Elijah replies.

"I imagine something like Tolstoy is a bit beyond you."

"Niklaus, there is no reason to rub it in. How do you find the weather?" Elijah asks, diplomatically. "London is rather dismal this time of year."

"Though never so entertaining as this, the year of our whimsical Lord, 1888."

"Niklaus, we do not talk about dead prostitutes at the table," Elijah interrupts before he can drone on.

* * *

Caroline arrives to pay her respects next morning by bursting into his office and shrieking, "You kidnapped and _poisoned_ them?"

He sets down his pen; naturally MP John Hubbard can wait. One does have to question whether the man can even read, given the logical fallacies which he has the immense gall to consider legitimate votes. He folds his hands over his unfinished letter and smiles up at her. "Good morning, love."

"Do _not_ sit here and _good morning_ me, you _freak_. I'm not sure what part of, 'hey, maybe you shouldn't treat your family like actual moldy _garbage_ ' translated into 'you know what would really help you make up for being a wretched garbage man-abduction!', but that is _not_ what I meant when I suggested you maybe just try, just for something different, to make it up to Kol."

"How else do you think I was to get him to stay, Caroline? We had a nice talk, at any rate. I think it was all very civil. And the chicken was very good. Of course, cook has the proper motivation."

"What, did you _kill_ the last one? You know what, no; _no_. Don't answer that," she snaps, holding up a hand when he opens his mouth to reply. "Just don't-oh _God_ , I am just so freaking _angry_ at you! It's like-you try and make some infinitesimal effort to be _better_ , to be something you're not, and you can't even-even then-"

"And who did I do that for, Caroline?" he asks, softly. He looks up into her eyes, into the soft curls, which in wild disarray frame her glowing cheeks, and she stops: just as he has done for her, when he has considered the order of his world as he has always kept it, and found, in her confrontation of it, something lacking. He can feel in the sudden tension of her shoulders, the hands which fist against the front of her trousers, a transformation of the air itself, which in its human caprice alters its matter to suit the moods of men; and perhaps that is why they hold such an inflated opinion of themselves.

"You should have done it for Kol," she says quietly.

He has many talents, as you no doubt have noted.

Chief among them is to scent the lowing of the prey, when it has come to the end of its natural endurance, and crawled shivering into the brush to await its inevitable demise. There is in her throat, her wrists, all the fluttering points of surrender; and in the heaving shoulders the herald of something even greater.

But of course, she is no man, who would have handed himself already into the grip of his huntsman, to be done with it.

He stands, and walks round the desk with his hands behind his back. He has no intention to touch her; no, no: they must come to it themselves, with wheezing breast, in glad concession to their fate.

She pushes him, very lightly, back against the desk, and into the right trouser pocket inserts her hand. "Don't. Touch. Me. Or I will shoot you again, in a much more vital area. Enzo taught me. I didn't have to hit you in the shoulder," she says, with cool assurance, and sweeps out of the office.

* * *

She paces, all night. From her bedroom to the window facing Baker Street, past the sofa, the work table and all the various deitrous of the consequences which taking Kol for a roommate entail: the slippers with tobacco in their toes, the jackknife in the mantel, _again_ , the spear in one of the pillows, the lamp he bumped in some play of either the sexual or boys being boys variety.

She tries to see the face of this 'saucy Jack' in the dim mists of evening Whitechapel, bending over his prey. She sees Klaus. She sees in him all these conflicting... _things_ which swim up into his eyes when he looks at her, and cannot be faked. She thinks: he's not a man, not quite, not as she understands them in all their usual hubris and vulnerability. She thinks: he's not quite other, either. In all the quivering strands of crimes which she tracks and traces back along these faint threads of misty connection to him-these are not all of it.

She paces, all night, and the boys do not come and the gas lights in slow procedural march come on, one by one, down the street. She sees all the mists in all the world gathering here, in bitter London: and the boys do not come.

She lights her own lamp. Sometimes in the dark, she hears it hissing when all the usual noises of living have settled down into slow sleep. She doesn't now. She hears, in the street, the occasional cab, and the fog horns which reach out with desperate faith into the dark. She hears in some far keyhole, a tenant scrabbling drunkenly for entrance.

There is no fire. She didn't want one. She wanted the cold to bring into her some semblance of rational thought. She wanted to feel it, and not his stare. She wanted...some hot anger to reassert itself, and bring her back to herself.

She paces from her bedroom to the window facing Baker Street and on her gazillionth pass of the bedroom, she looks out over the yard, into the strange temperaments of the fog, which sinks the boulevards into white foam, unbroken, and here leaves only a few scanty rags.

She paces from her bedroom to the window facing Baker Street, and on her gazillionth pass of the bedroom, she looks out over the yard, and she sees him.

Sometimes she thinks, when the fog has cleared, she will see him standing underneath her window, looking up at her, and something will move her automatically: she thought that. She thought: that's how nice girls disappear, and she turned down the lamp.

He stands with his head bare in the mist.

He stands with no dimply certainty of his success, but simply looks up, with something in his eyes. And she knows it, but she cannot name it. She thinks: if she names it, it gains all the tangibility it needs to make it irrefutable. She thinks: maybe it already has.

He stands with his head bare in the mist, and the boys do not come.

She turns down the lamp, and unlatches her window.

* * *

 _And here we might end it, on this tantalizing note._

 _But there was one more piece which is of some interest to the central mystery; upon first glance it is nothing of any great import, considering the participants. But we must not let their ordinariness lull us into the complacency of inattention._

* * *

It is on a nasty Tuesday he and Tim follow Stefan into the fogs of Holywell Street with their mufflers round their chins. And with the mist in their bones, quite comfortable with its lodgings, they take the right fork, down onto Wych Street.

"Isn't that the brothel where we found your sister?" Tim whispers when Stefan has disappeared behind one very familiar door.

"Yes," he says, with no inflection in his voice.

"Maybe it's a raid. Or he's gone round to ask questions about the case himself."

"He's in civilian clothes."

"Well, you can't have no coppers poking their noses round the place obvious so. Bad for business."

The fog creeps its slow demanding way down the turns of Wych Street, into the lone drowning crevices. "Who is it told Caroline of a police conspiracy involving the Whitechapel murders, so she'd know only to trust the man who provided her with such information, a friend for whom she might have a blind spot?"

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph," Tim says, and the fogs come on, inexorably.

* * *

 **A/N: ALL RIGHTY, SO. The original plan was actually to have KC bang in this chapter...but then I remembered that I'm an asshole and left it as you see here. REMEMBER- if you stab me with a pitchfork, they'll never get to do it.**

 **In the next, actual, final part: two mysteries are unraveled, there will probably be more cross dressing, and there will definitely be sex, especially if I can contrive any reason whatsoever for why it's actually vital to the plot to describe Rebekah and Katherine doing it.**

 **Till next time.**


	6. Part Six

**A/N: Welcome, at last, to the final part of this fic! I don't want to ramble on here too much considering how long the wait has been, so let's just get straight to the notes.**

 **All puns stolen shamelessly from the internet.**

 **Any newspaper excerpt is taken directly from primary sources; ditto the excerpts from the inquest on Mary Kelly's murder. The only exception is the very last newspaper article, which I wrote (that'll be fairly obvious when you get to it). A certain very gay party is based on newspaper accounts of one which took place in 1880, in Manchester.** **The bit with the client and his thumb is based on Doyle's 'The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb'. Kol's examination of Mary Jane Kelly is quoted directly from the notes of the medical examiner.**

 **I hope you enjoy, and sorry for the wait!**

* * *

 _It is with regret that I pen the final words of this account. To leave a story is difficult enough for the reader, and unbearable for its creator. What you have done is merely put on the suit; and I have sewn it, through every painful needle stick._

 _It may be asked why I have now decided to record the details of this event four years after its conclusion, when history has resigned itself to ignorance, and the newsmen ceased to hawk their theories. In all the world, there are seven people to whom the perpetrator of these murders is known; two of them have not lived to our epilogue. For those fortunate few which have stumbled across this volume, you may count yourselves among the rare enlightened; I have endeavoured by clever sleight of hand to obscure my identity, and though you will not be made privy to it even at the last, I can say that I was somewhat more intimately involved than this detached narrative may suggest. In metaphor we can bury the truth near the top soil, and depend upon it being taken for a simple display of our authorial hubris. A story is not about its writer; it cannot be. To dissect the formless threads which in some way bolster our shifting fates, he must be something more than human. If we wish him to understand each of us who comes to his text looking for ourselves, he must have something of the divine in him; he must channel a universal knowledge. He must not know simply himself, and he must not be concerned simply with himself._

 _Ah, but he is._

 _For what human sees the morning heather in summer dress, and does not relate it to his daily ride, or decide it worthy of his next painting- he looks on everything he has never touched, and for which he cannot take credit, and inserts himself somehow into its existence, so that it may have meaning_

 _And that is why you have come. Not for the mystery of it, no, not for the identity of this man whom you now know as Jack the Ripper; you come to find yourselves. And so have I written it. To pick through the various strands and find answers to my own questions; there are things which even I must wrestle. You will not think a mind such as I have demonstrated in these writings has to scrabble after anything, turning it round to examine it from different angles, and at last putting it down in stark black and white, where comprehension waits patiently._

 _Only in books can we find our deepest longings, where they have lain naked for so long it seems irrational to deny them._

 _But even the sharpest of you must be somewhat overwhelmed by these musings; and there is some small interest in the mystery._

 _We proceed, then._

* * *

Fog down the long dreaming avenues, sounding the depths of the world. Fog in the masts of the harbour, and the chimneys of the factories. Fog asleep on the church steeples and boiling in the rivers. Fog with human obstinacy coming on, as the whole mad race has come on for centuries. Fog, fog, fog, and all the ceaseless world, beholden to it.

It's just terrible for her hair.

She feels the tendrils of it misbehaving at her neck, which might all be very lovely for that Forbes girl. The middle class don't mind that sort of thing.

She touches the nape of her neck.

On Wych Street her footsteps find their way back to her, endlessly, knocking round the walls, and the shutters, and coming back to her with a muffled retort that at each repetition flinches the skin beneath that misbehaving hair, just a bit.

Of course there's no danger, to any one such as her. She has a skirt of water green beneath her coat, and naturally a whore's hair has never known this sort of lustre.

But still, she walks on a bit faster.

She feels the hairs at her nape again, touching her spine, touching her spine, breathing on it their feathery grazes, with a presentiment sort of nuance. It's the sort of feeling Nik likes to think he inspires in people.

Fog, fog, billowing out, to touch all the slumbering shutters. Fog, fog, in all the tender bones of her.

She is halfway to Katherine's when she hears an oddness in the echoing footsteps; a lag that isn't coming from her own.

And over her shoulder- over her shoulder, the silhouette of a man.

* * *

The fog touches her hands and touches her wrists and touches all the long way up her arms, under the sleeves of her dress.

The fog comes in through the window, comes in through the window, comes in through the window, one unbroken wave, and she thinks, she thinks- oh God-

She might die. She might like it.

That's what she feels, standing here in the window, with the fog unbroken, and the gaze unbroken, and the curls somewhere in misty half-existence under the fog, under the far lost gas lights.

* * *

The fog seems to enclose her.

Of course there is no shortage of men in this area; they have to slake whatever it is their wives are too maidenly to endure, naturally.

Regardless: she takes off her right glove, and slides the knife underneath it out from its sheath. There is every last mangled whore fresh in her mind, courtesy of the _Illustrated Police News_ , which Elijah does not allow her to read, and which Nik encourages, in order to be difficult. She has the skin of a girl, and no silly murderer is going to mar that.

She hears the footsteps creeping up on her. She hears the even breathing creeping up on her. She looks over her shoulder again.

But there is only a hat, coming at moments out of the fog, and then vanishing back into it, and the features beneath it drowned, long drowned-

She takes up a firmer grip on the knife, and she walks on, faster, faster, with the footsteps going on behind her, at the same pace, at the same rhythm, they join in easy synchronization her own, till she can't tell how fast it is he's coming up on her, and she feels the hairs freer at her neck now, and does not touch them, she doesn't-

"Rebekah," he says, just behind her, and she takes one stumbling step forward as her legs understand suddenly that she must run, and his arms come round her.

She screams, and slashes backward with the knife.

* * *

She leans on the window sill, breathing heavily.

There is in all the world just him, just her. Once there must have been some dumb playact of other living; but there's nothing.

He says her name, once.

He takes one step toward the window, looking- oh God, looking, not smug. Not smug, but something- something disbelieving. Something tender. It's not that she doesn't have the words for it; she doesn't have the language. She has in no corner of her the rationale to encompass what he has let come into his eyes.

So he comes on. He comes on.

And the window stays open and the gas light burns low and under the collar of her dress her throat heaves and under the curls, under the fog, his eyes do not burn like the things that are encountered in late mists, and best left there, she sees closer now the same incomprehensible something that maybe softer minds, with more romance in them, have dreamed into, like, empurpled being or whatever. And she isn't going to be saved and she doesn't want to be saved, and she reaches down, with her bare hand.

And he takes it in his ungloved own, and presses it to his mouth.

It's not a kiss. He just wants to feel all the varying textures of her, against him.

He's too far down for her to reach anything else, but there's a drainage pipe beside the window, and he lets go of her hand, reluctantly, and he takes it up, eagerly.

"Wait," she says, when he's reached the window, but her fingers touch his throat when she says it, and feel the nervous movements of it, and she takes this breath, this long, long breath, and he stares at her, like- like she can crush him, and she's already gone, she's already chosen.

She grabs him by the throat, and pulls him into her room.

* * *

Naturally, he and Tim mount a dashing rescue.

They are on their way to Katherine's room for an interrogation of all things Stefan Salvatore when some mad harpy begins to shriek her head off in the street below.

"That's my sister; nobody else can be that blood-curdling," he says, and turning on his heel, goes tearing back down the hallway; there are rather strict rules in the Mikaelson family regarding murder. Only another Mikaelson is allowed to take the life of a fellow Mikaelson. Whatever's got hold of her isn't bloody well entitled to that sort of pleasure.

He finds her in the street on her knees with a knife in her hand, and finds it necessary to dodge a few passes of it whilst she's finishing her hysterics. "Bekah. _Bekah_ , it's me. What's happened?" He kneels down and takes her by the shoulders.

"He grabbed me. He grabbed me," she sobs. "He tried to-"

" _Who_?" he demands; Tim kneels beside him.

"I don't know. I don't know," she gasps, and lets him take the knife from her shaking hand. "I couldn't see his face. He said my name. He knew my name. Do you think it was- it was that _man_ , wasn't it?"

"I don't know," he says. "Let's collar him and find out, shall we?"

"No; don't leave me, Kol. _Don't leave me_. What if he comes back?" she gasps, and latching onto his sleeve when he tries to stand, holds him where he's knelt with the sort of force one expects from a talon, which certainly is no inapt word for Bekah's clutches.

Being a gentleman of incomparable gentlemanliness, he puts his arms round her, and propping his chin on her head says to Tim, "You've a trail at least. Don't get killed; I'll be disappointed."

"Right," Tim replies, and having already taken out his revolver, moves off into the fog, in the direction of Bekah's attacker, who upon tussling with her, escaped more fortunately than most, with only a moderately-sized hole in him, judging by the amount of blood he's left.

"You're ruining your skirts," he tells her, and jostles her a bit, but the wet face is only adjusted a bit, and smushed more securely into his chest, to ruin his coat with the whole lot of whatever cosmetics she's managed to sneak round beneath Elijah's nose. "Don't worry, darling. He killed those other women by mortal means. What was he going to do to you? Isn't there a ritual and a blood sacrifice or something that's necessary in order to defeat you? I'm sure he was only going to strangle you a little. It's nice, if they know what they're doing."

"Oh, shut up, you little brat."

But she stays rather cosily in his arms, and sniffling, puts her arms round his waist, as if they're only children again, and Father's scolding has made its usual segue into violence. "Shh, shh," he says by old habit, and rubs his cheek against her head.

It's only a moment he has, to feel at the old love again, which time and Nik have worn away; and then from out of the fog comes Tim on silent boots, his revolver put away unfired.

"Nothing," he says, shaking his head. "Trail ends just a few feet or so from here. It must be you only knicked him."

"I know how to _stab_ someone, thank you. Maybe you don't know how to _see_."

Tim's face undergoes the struggle of a man bound by his morals and his upbringing to be a gentleman about the entire thing.

"Sorry; she's always been a bit of a cunt. Takes after Nik that way."

" _Kol_ ," she snaps, and punches him in the stomach.

"Yes, darling, mangle me, that'll prove me wrong. Anyway, relax. No one's trying to impugn your honour by implying you don't know how to properly stab a man. I can testify otherwise. Now here," he says, giving her his sleeve to mop up her eyes. "Get up; people will think we like one another."

Tim, being a better man than most any, puts out a hand for her, and helps her off her wobbly knees; between the two of them she is brushed up nicely enough, and the hair re-pinned. "Go straight to Katherine," he tells her, taking her by the shoulders once more. "We'll wait, and watch till you're in the house. Don't set a foot outside till morning, all right?"

"Don't be so bossy," she snaps, wiping at her eyes. "You sound like Nik."

He fixes the collar of her coat. "Fine. Be mutilated. What do I care? It isn't my face, which would be an incalculable loss. Yours is looking a little sallow, so I suppose that's all right."

" _Sallow_?"

Tim sighs midway through the act of returning her knife, and holds it over her head. "How _dare_ you," Bekah flames up at him, jumping for it with such indignity it almost smooths the absurdity of bouncing round on those little ridiculous boots she's wearing.

"Well, you have to be promising me you won't use it on your brother so."

"I don't have to make any promises to _you_ , you dirty-" This seems to Bekah a sufficient summary of Tim's defects, and she leaves off the bother of finishing her sentence to insert the heel of her boot into Tim's shin. There follows a stream of language which Tim generally refrains from using even in front of his fellow dockers, for reasons of common decency; some words have the roughness of fresh invention, and are mashed somewhat inexpertly with their nearest relatives, to nearly unintelligible effect.

Bekah smiles prettily as Tim drops his arm and brings the knife back within her reach. With the sort of flair she could only have learned from Nik, she re-sheathes it, and daintily pats a loose strand of hair back into obedience. "I can't believe some man had the gall to bleed onto this dress; it's my favourite."

"Well, I'm sure Satan can conjure up another at your next tea party."

"If we're not busy cursing you," she returns loftily, fixing his earlier adjustment of her coat, and patting him on the cheek. "Now, don't worry. You can crawl back into whatever gutter ejected you," Bekah instructs them both as if she's bestowing some sort of gift, and sweeps off toward Katherine's with her head on approximately the same level as the queen's.

"Can you walk?" he asks as soon as Bekah is safely inside. "I'm going to kill whoever attacked her, and we're going to need most of the night for it. Possibly tomorrow as well; I hope you didn't have any plans."

* * *

When she throws him down on the bed, he starts to get up.

And she snaps, " _No_ ", and pushes him back down with the heel of her boot.

When she sinks down onto him, his eyes roll back in his head.

* * *

Bekah's attacker is sufficiently lacking in manners to neglect to present himself for his own horrific murder. It's rude, of course; but then you can't expect much else from society.

The morning is coming on nicely by the time they reach the Baker Street flat. The fog, properly chastised, has slunk away elsewhere, which makes it all a bit less romantic so far as brutal dismemberment is concerned; but he isn't Nik, he doesn't require all those theatrics. You can gut a man as efficiently in the sunlight, and the pedestrians are just as awed.

They have the means to get off the necessary clothing before collapsing into bed and dying most peacefully; he's sorry to say there's still a chaste assortment of trousers, shirt sleeves and vest between the two of them.

Tim, as it turns out, is one of those bed mates who feels entitled to the entire thing, and having wrapped himself in the bed linens, then devotes himself to flopping round any limb he hasn't secured. They both drop off in the middle of a disagreement over the pillow, and upon awakening, he discovers that Tim won it, or at least felt himself sufficiently superior in weight and height to bully it out of him.

"You Catholic fuck," he murmurs into the side of Tim's neck, which at some point has wedged itself against his face.

"'E's 'ere, Miss Forbes!" someone blares from the doorway, and turning to blink muggily at this intrusion, he finds Wiggins staring at him. "E's in bed with Mr. Tim!"

There is afterward a dramatic amount of thundering and a frankly unnecessary look on Caroline's face as she bursts into the room and flings a hand over Wiggins' eyes before she can even determine that he's sitting here all very innocently, with a decided lack of sinning.

Tim flings a leg over him.

"What's wrong with him? Is he dead?"

"You'd think so, if he can sleep through your voice. Anyway, we're having a lie in, darling. We didn't get in till nearly six."

"Ok, well, it's noon now. Wake him up. I need the two of you."

"Sorry; we have a bit of private investigating we need to finish up."

"Kol!" she scolds him, and covers Wiggins' ears.

"What?"

"I thought that was a euphemism for your penis."

"I meant it literally. And also in the metaphorical penis sense."

" _Kol_."

He props himself on an elbow to have a proper squint at her. "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing."

"Don't lie to me. You're flustered about something."

"I'm flustered that I have a maniac running around the East End killing prostitutes and not only do I not know who it is, but your brother, head murderer extraordinaire, doesn't even know who it is. And I thought all criminals had to, like, check in with him before even pick pocketing someone." She lets up on Wiggins. "Go downstairs, ok? I'll give you your instructions in a second," she says to the boy.

"Caroline."

"Up, up," she says, with the sort of cheer she has had to inject into her voice, to smooth over whatever it is that's got hold of her.

* * *

"She's fucking Nik," he says when Tim has been awakened by prodigious use of pushing him out of the bed, and then led like a very angry child into the sitting room for toast. Caroline has nipped out into the street to tidy up her Baker Street Irregulars into whatever manner of colour-coordinated regulation she considers necessary to their very survival.

Tim chokes on his toast, and is engaged in trying to dislodge it when Caroline returns.

"Are you ok?"

"He's fine; he's fit a lot more into his mouth. I suppose I could say the same for you as well, darling?"

"What?"

"What?" he parrots, putting on his most innocent face, very nice, only marginally less handsome, in his opinion; a little hint of sexual perversion always livens up any features, regardless of their natural charms (or lack thereof).

"Anyway, I need Tim to learn how to dance. We're going to a party tonight for a case."

This announcement is met with all the expected terror, but in the end, before God and Enzo, Tim is coaxed into a passable knowledge of any gentlemanly repertoire, and then stuffed into a suit. The hat is confiscated, and a pair of white gloves put on over his calluses. Caroline has her usual ecstasies over Enzo, who is the most cooperative of them all, and nags him unfairly about his waistcoat, which he can say perfectly conceals his assortment of knives and guns. The bomb is a little obtrusive, but there's no reason he shouldn't be dashing in a roguish, exploding sort of way.

It all comes off well enough; Tim goes timidly up to a girl who's sat out every dance on account of her face, and makes her a sad, stammering offer, and rather looks ready to cry at the immense effort of opening his mouth. He is afterward obliged to sit with her, in order to avoid her disappointment, and is on the verge of an accidental engagement when it's time for the chase scene. (He is very nearly unbearably handsome in the course of it, if you were wondering.) They depart the party in a carriage which he has borrowed for the occasion, and drives in his usual sedate fashion. Tim, trying to mind her aches, so that she is fresh for the grandchildren, screams something about slowing down, but as it's only a lot of nonsense, he couldn't tell you more than the bare outline of it, and certainly none of the details which Tim is trying to communicate through a stream of invective about his mother.

"She's dead, darling. And she was a terrible bitch, really." He snaps the reins. "So I'll take that as a compliment."

"Left!" Caroline screams.

Enzo, hanging out one window while Tim with an unnecessary amount of dramatics swings from the other, fires off his pistol at the carriage clattering along in front of them. There's a cry from the box, and the horses lunge away with terrified cries, veering into one of the narrow side streets. From its windows emerges one hand and then another, bearing their own weapons. Tim lets out another stream of creative variations on 'you fucking arsehole cunting maggot Jesus fuck ye wild-eyed cunt.'

"Are you shot?"

"No, I'm not shot," Tim yells, and discharges a bullet past his ear.

"Then what are you complaining about?"

"You nearly pitched me out the fucking window, you mad bastard!"

"There, there!" Caroline shrieks. "Take this street; we'll cut them off!"

And so on and so forth; naturally they're triumphant. The other carriage is overturned, and the battered inhabitants held at gunpoint till Scotland Yard can be bothered to manage the simplest part of the job.

"Ye're a mad cunt," Tim tells him when they've seen Caroline's suspects off in the prison van. It's all a bit sentimental, but Tim can't help such a perfectly natural attraction.

Afterward they leave Caroline and Enzo to return the carriage, and walk arm in arm to Katherine's, to finish up their interrogation. Bekah is absent, but Katherine receives them in the parlour with tea and biscuits.

"Stefan isn't a customer," she says, taking a sip from her little tea cup as if she's a lady.

"We saw him come in just last night. Right before Bekah was attacked."

"Yes, he was here, but not as a client. He was looking for his brother."

"What brother?"

"You don't know Damon? Well, I guess he is abroad often. And he is the...family embarrassment."

"A position of honour," he says, slapping Tim's hand away as it reaches for one of the biscuits. You never know if they've been alone with Bekah. "So he was looking for his brother?"

"Yes, but Damon wasn't here. He is, often, and I suppose Stefan assumed he would be. He was only here a few minutes. I'd say he left maybe a minute or so before I heard the screaming in the street." The accent has come a little out of the posh tones into which she has coaxed it, and mashed up the 'h' a bit. You can take the tsar out of the girl (though why would you) but you can never take the girl out of the tsar; or something of that nature, anyway. He's had a rough day.

"Does Bekah know Stefan?"

"That's something you'd have to ask her."

"Have you ever seen them talking? Has he ever approached her whilst he's here? Do you think-"

"That your sister is or ever was fucking him? He's a police officer."

"You're a whore." He sits back and crosses his legs, mirroring her. "Let's not pretend Bekah has my impeccable taste."

Katherine flicks her eyes to Tim, whose face takes on a mildly offended look, but as he's rather concerned someone may at some future point attempt to include him in the conversation, it's a very brief look; he puts his hand into his pocket to fiddle round with his watch.

"You'll have to ask Bekah that. But so far as I'm aware- no. I've never seen them interact. But she's usually distracted whenever she's here. So." She gives him a smirk which would not be out of place on his own face. Tim pretends to ignorance, and betrays himself with a colouring that no Irish man has ever coaxed out of his cheeks without heavy cosmetic application, or thirty seconds in the sunlight.

The affair is soon afterwards wrapped up, and they're put once more out into the night, where he pulls up his muffler against the fogs, and taking another out of his waistcoat, hands it off to Tim.

"Are we going to get a cab at the Strand?" Tim asks, shutting up his mouth in the muffler, and pocketing the bare hands which were divested of their white gloves immediately upon departure of the party.

"No. Let's walk on a bit. We'll catch one farther on."

So into the mist they go, which now rises in the boiling sort of way one sees off agitated seas, enclosing their legs to the knee. He puts his arm through Tim's, and keeps one hand within reach of his pistol(s); Tim, doing likewise, looks down at him, but is some time mulling over his approach before he at last speaks.

"Are you sure it isn't only you want it to be Stefan, so you have an excuse to put one in his teeth?"

"Don't be reasonable, Tim. I'm not in the mood for it."

"Could be your man in Whitechapel didn't have anything to do with it. Sure there's men like to put a good fright into the lasses by creeping up on them. I read there's been loads of incidences like that since those poor women got it on the same night. I'm only saying."

"Well don't say. There are better things you could do with your mouth."

Tim looks at him in a soft sort of way which he cannot remember; of course he must have had it from someone, somewhere. Caroline, in her pre-Nik days.

One does save up the bits of loneliness in some deep part, till they've gone frothy with their eagerness, and bang round the fortifying bits all in one clamoring rush. He looks up at Tim, and thinks of Caroline, smelling of Nik, with something new in her eyes, not quite rapture; but certainly something he has seen before, and had to brace himself against.

Tim reaches down and takes his face in the big hands, the fingers spread to get at as much of him as they can, one thumb smoothing the left eyebrow, which he never can get to lie flat. "You look so sad." And the other thumb touches his brow, just beneath his fringe, lightly, lightly, as if he's worthy of that sort of care.

The mist comes down between them.

He has to tip his head back to get a proper look into Tim's face, which is only patiently waiting for him to speak or not speak, whichever he likes. "Do you think," he asks in an unsanded sort of way which he has taught himself not to use, not before man and all his pleasures of such weaknesses, "that Caroline will leave me for Nik?"

"No," Tim says, and takes the thumb over the untamed eyebrow once more. "No, you silly arsehole," he says softly, and ducks down, not to kiss him, but so their foreheads are each holding up the other, whilst the world goes on around them.

"Bekah did. And anyway, what do you know? You stepped on my feet at least half a dozen times trying to do a two-step."

"It's a difficult dance."

"You have to walk to a beat, Tim."

"Well, it's a difficult beat."

They both smile at one another, and it's easy in the way of things that are only natural to slide into him, just a bit, till both their arms have come round the other; he pulls down the muffler to kiss Tim's chin, to test it, and then his mouth, only briefly, and stands looking into the soft features which the mizzling darkness has gentled. He can feel in the stiffness of Tim's back his consciousness of the pedestrians which at rare intervals sink and rise in the boiling depths of drowned London, but they kiss again anyway, a lingering pecking of the lips, and then another when that isn't sufficient.

"Can't you sit down or something while we're having this moment? You're breaking my neck."

"Can't you fucking grow?"

"Can't you not be something fished up out of a High-street freak show?"

"Oh. Tell me I'm loveable, he says, while abusing me."

"Am I?" he asks, kissing the stubbly chin again.

"I suppose. When you aren't driving a fecking carriage you awful gobshite."

* * *

When she and Enzo have seen off the criminals, and returned the carriage, she tiptoes into the Baker Street apartment, and listens for a moment to the even breathing from Kol's room, shutting her eyes.

And then she strips out of her dress, and gets into her trousers, and she goes to the flat in Whitechapel, and she does not even have to knock on the door: he opens it as she's coming down the alley.

He beams all over his face, and steps back, so that it's her choice, whether she is drawn forward, or repelled into the mists.

And she steps inside, and shuts the door behind her.

* * *

They always crash into one another, like there can be no soft courtship of shyly questing hands, asking. She always has to hurt him. He always has to be hurt. And oh _God_ , she does- she puts her nails in his back, his ass, the nape of his neck, and when he sighs long into her neck, his wet open mouth touching the skin there, tasting it, she yanks back his head by the curls at his nape, and bites his lip.

They never make it to the bed, at first. There's this wild frenzy, against the wall, on the floor; he can't get his pants down fast enough. He doesn't take off anything else; he gets what clothes of hers are not conducive to sex the hell out of the way, and thrusts into her, one hot slow stroke. And then she bites his shoulder or she scratches his belly and it's almost unhinged, how they move against one another, trying to kiss, trying to breathe, till she cries out and arches into him with this shudder that sends its white fizzing into her toes, and he breathes into her hair, almost a moan, and comes.

They catch their breath, for a little while. And then she slides into his lap with what sighs she cannot stifle, and hooking her legs around him, moves in this leisurely rippling, letting her head drop back. She does not look at him. She feels him all along her, the slipping of his chest over her nipples, the rasping of the strong thighs underneath her, sweat-ruffled, the endlessly patient, patient stroking, the hot blunt sliding of his head along her, into her- but she does not look at him.

His hands touch her clit, touch her throat, and she teeters on the verge of her orgasm once, twice, before he lets her come.

Sometimes she just lays back.

Sometimes he crawls down the whole slick length of her, from her mouth to her legs, her twitching thighs, and farther in. He kisses everywhere she doesn't want him, and nowhere she does- and then with her fist in his hair, he slides his tongue into her, and his thumb comes up, and gives her clit one slow stroke, and she practically freaking levitates.

There is inevitably some ridiculous argument, at some point, because he cannot even remotely comprehend the fact that sometimes he is just _wrong_ , and then she gets back into her pants and storms out ahead of him, and he chases her down like a _lunatic_ , seething that anyone has had the nerve to walk away from the great _Him_ , and there's this complete meltdown in the street while he shrieks that she'll be murdered at this hour of the night, and she points out that is perfectly A-ok with _her_ , alternative company considered, and then they tumble all over each other, trying to get back into the apartment, and have sex again.

And sometimes, when the world is buried in cold slumbers, he lays with his cheek on her thigh, and he laughs into her skin. It is not like anything she has heard from him before.

They set out sometimes, on some nights, into all the back alleys of direst Whitechapel, lobbing theories and patronizing street vendors and talking endlessly endlessly. Sometimes she thinks to herself: no, not this. She finds all the wrong boys. She says to herself, so _hard_ , but this one is different, and he will love me differently. She says that, always. But boys are only human, and subject to all their changing whims.

She thinks: but this one is different, and she knows, she _knows_ , ok, that this time she means it; this time he means it.

There was a girl, never loved, not like that: and then there came a monster.

* * *

November is this shy antiquated creature, hobbling on with sad frosts, to kill with slow apology the burning trees. She takes on three cases in a week, and has them all solved within the space of it. There's this teensy incident where she has to take the boys to task for setting one (1) fire from which a man, naked, barely escaped, by rolling himself, weeping, into the street, still bound to the chair which is the sole other survivor of his ruined pub.

"Do not even _think_ I don't know whose cigarettes lit that fire," she snaps when Tim gives her this sort of hangdog look that she thinks probably won over his mother a lot, but is so completely lost on her.

"He wasn't even there," Kol pipes up.

" _Excuse_ me? His sleeve? The nail on his left middle finger?" she barks, holding up the offending arm.

Kol shrugs. "Sorry, darling. I tried."

"Sure you didn't try very hard."

"Can't you pretend to believe my lies every once in a while? I'm trying to impress him by covering up his violent crimes, like a gentleman."

She whips around on them so quickly that Tim blurts out, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph" as if she has loomed up out of some creaking stairwell. "Yeah, you're going to need all of them," she tells him with cold menace. "You might want to take out your rosary, while you're at it."

"Leave him alone," Kol says, swinging his leg where he's draped it over the arm of her favourite chair. "He didn't do it alone."

"Well, I have to yell at _somebody_ who's actually afraid of me, because you two clearly could not be less concerned about the fact that you almost murdered that man in cold blood."

"He did threaten you, gorgeous," Enzo points out.

She puts her hands together under her nose. "Ok. I understand how that might have upset you, and I appreciate your concern, but sometimes we do things like not killing people; we arrest them like good, law-abiding citizens who are content to let justice sort everything out." She shuts her eyes very slowly. "Tim, control your face. I follow laws, ok? Unless they're unnecessary, or hindering me, _and_! I only break them in sane, non-violent ways."

"Danny Baker," Enzo immediately replies.

"That girl with the very large breasts," Kol adds, and is discreetly punched by Tim, who covers the act of violence with a cough.

"Those were extenuating circumstances."

"So was this," Enzo insists.

"Ok, I am going to say this very emphatically: you cannot murder, or attempt to murder, everyone who threatens, thinks about threatening, or otherwise harbors uncharitable thoughts about me."

"That's demonstrably untrue, darling," Kol says.

"Right, I didn't understand any of that," Enzo agrees.

"I think it was nicely put," Tim tries.

"Take your face off my ass and go sort every article I've saved on the Whitechapel Murderer into chronological order," she barks at him.

"They're already in chronological order?"

She takes them down from the shelf, and with an immense pain in her heart, dumps them all at Tim's feet.

* * *

"L."

"George Henry Lamson, born 1852, executed 28 April 1882, a doctor, poisoned his crippled brother-in-law Percy John to help along his wife's inheritance. He used aconitine in a Dundee cake, kind of an unusual choice, but it'll definitely do the trick, and painfully. K."

"Constance Emily Kent. The infamous Road House murder, as I'm sure you know, love. Mutilated poor young Saville and stuffed him down the privy. She found her conscience in a convent in Brighton, and in 1865 confessed. Currently at large, after twenty years in Millbank Prison. W."

"Henry Wainwright. Our original Whitechapel Murderer. Born 1838, hanged 1875. Heir to a brush-manufacturing concern in Whitechapel. After taking on a second mistress, he stopped funding his first, which prompted a confrontation, because who wants to be a kept woman without actually being kept? He shot her, stashed her under a floorboard at one of his warehouses, poured half a hundredweight of chloride of lime on her, and called it good. Except! As you would know, you don't store bodies at your place of business because they do their decomposing thing and it's not like you can keep saying, 'Oh, terribly sorry, I had some cabbage at lunch' every time someone brings up the smell. So he disinterred her, chopped her into pieces, and then took everything to Southwark to rebury it, only the brushmaker, Alfred Stokes, that he'd taken with him to help, got suspicious, peeked into one of the packages, and saw that he had a bunch of pieces of lady on his hands and tattled. Which. Why do criminals always make that mistake? You don't _tell_ anyone; you bury the body and shut your mouth." She drops a lump of sugar into his tea before he can do it himself.

"Sometimes you just need to brag." He adds the splash of milk that she was just thinking about into her own cup. "But then you clean up after yourself." He takes this lofty sip, like she's going to critique him on his faulty tea drinking posture.

"Could you please not subtly allude to your murderous pastimes when we have reached a tentative stalemate that you are inevitably going to screw up? T."

"Sarah Thomas, born 1831, executed, dramatically, 1849. Battered her nasty old employer to death with a stone, and then shoved the body of her employer's dog head-first into the privy. Some of us don't know when to stop."

"So you're saying animal cruelty is where you draw the line?"

"Animals are better people than any person, sweetheart, and don't deserve our ignominious ends. Anyway, our lovely Ms. Thomas was dragged to the press-yard by six turnkeys, screaming and fighting all the way, and after her hanging, got herself stuffed unceremoniously into a re-used coffin with the remains of Mary Ann Burdock." He passes her a section of the newspaper they are sharing over the table. "B."

"You know I'm probably going to have to have you hanged one day?"

He leans forward over the table with this smile that is 100% sexual, and touches her in places she would rather not be touched during a polite tea. "I'm looking forward to the attempt."

"B. Mary Ann Britland, born 1847, hanged 1886. Poisoned her oldest daughter, her husband, plus the wife of her alleged lover. Which is really-" In the street below, she hears, through all the various clamouring of noonday London, Tim's gangly loping, and Kol trying to keep up with it. She snaps her head around to Klaus. "Get up!" she hisses, lunging at him over the table.

He looks at her all dimply, like this is a _sex_ thing, and he always knew she was going to break, and throw herself heedless into his arms, with loudly heaving bosoms or whatever it is men like this imagine must be the powerless reaction of every vaguely hot-blooded woman within their perimeter. "Get up get up get _up_! Kol and Tim are coming, and someone in this room just poisoned and possibly tortured them recently, so, completely understandably, they are a little uncomfortable in your presence and I am a horrible friend for entertaining three seconds of your company without even one grandiose revenge attempt. And get the tea; I've got the paper." She digs her fingers into the shoulder she shot when he won't move, and with a hiss, he startles up out of his chair, opening his mouth in order to twirl his moustaches, but eloquently, in murder of baroque hexameter or whatever, and she claps a hand over his mouth and shoves him through the door of her bedroom because she can hear them on the steps, calling out to Mrs. Hudson, calling out to the page Billy, calling out to the cat which has made the little Baker Street stoop its residence, and shrieks till the boys greet it every time they pass-

Klaus stumbles a little as his wounded shoulder knocks aside the door, and as soon as she's taken away her hand to lock the door behind them, says, "Does this mean you forfeit our little game?"

"Shut up," she whispers, and the boys come surging into the sitting room at full volume, laughing uproariously over something.

"Don't be touching that," Tim says. "You know she'll spot it soon as she walks in the door."

She hears in the interim, when there is only the breathing from the boys, and the breathing in her ear, the soft whistling of one of her beakers and the great fumbling _plap_ of Tim's nearly disastrous miss. "Well, now you've touched it too, darling, so we'll both die."

She stifles an outburst, and taking Klaus by the collar of his jacket, shoves him toward the window.

Kol sinks with his usual aplomb into the best chair, putting up his feet on her worktable, and settling himself in with all the casualness of good-looking men trying casually to casually seduce the great love of their little murdery sex pervert hearts, and with a handful of Klaus' collar, she rolls her eyes, and she freezes, right before the window.

Enzo is standing in the yard with his hands in his pockets, talking to Mrs. Hudson.

She jerks Klaus away toward the wardrobe; he jostles the tea all over himself.

There is a knock at the door to the sitting room.

Kol, being too attractively situated to rouse himself, leaves the answering of it to Tim.

"Hello. Em- can I help you? You'll be looking for Caroline, will you?"

"Oh- well. I was looking for the consulting detective I was told lives here. I assumed-"

"They're a man, darling, we know. She's usually back for tea, if you want to wait. Since you're missing your thumb, I assume you have some problem of the missing thumb variety."

The voice is young, not anything more than twenty-five, but with the crispness of education and authority to it, a career man, trade, naturally, heavy equipment. It says, "Yes, yes, I think I had better do that" and wafts its way into the apartment, at intervals growing louder as it passes the door to her room, and retreating subtly as it is directed to the sofa.

"Name?" Kol asks.

"Are you the detective?"

"No, only nosy, darling. Kol, handsome associate of the detective. This is Tim, resident specialist."

"Specialist in what?"

"Penis."

"Excuse me?"

"Pens. He's a clerk, darling."

"Ah. Well. Anyway. Victor Hatherley."

Somewhere away down the hall the great clock chimes and in the streets there is the soft tsok tsoking of the horses pondering their way through the November mud and at the window there tap taps the first tentative attempts of a gathering squall.

"So exactly what is the story behind the thumb, darling?"

"Sorry, I thought you said you weren't the detective?"

"Do you have somewhere else to be? You have no thumb, and apparently that's surprised you enough to seek out a detective. No harm in getting the details tidied up before you speak to her, is there? So you've lost your thumb, and you want to find it?"

"No, I-"

"Tim can sketch a bit; here, darling."

For a moment there is the swift whispering of pencil over page. "Is this your thumb, sir?"

"What?! I don't know! It's _a_ thumb-"

"So you don't know your own thumb. Very suspicious, don't you think, Tim? Probably just wanted an excuse to talk to me."

" _What_? I don't even know you! I am here to speak with a private detective called Forbes that I was referred to, and if you can't produce her-"

"Produce her? She isn't in my pocket, darling."

And then the swift uneven stride of Enzo up the stairs which tremble beneath his flight, and the clattering of the door into the mantle. "Hullo, mates. What have we got here?"

"We're solving a mystery. This chap has no thumb."

"Fuck me he doesn't. How did you manage that?"

"I've been _trying_ to explain it for some minutes-"

"Well you haven't been doing a very good job, darling. Tim's drawn up the person of interest and everything, and this man hasn't even recognised it."

"You don't know your own thumb?"

"He's sketched _a thumb_ , how am I to know if it's mine? How is _he_ to know if it's my thumb? He's never seen it in all his life!"

"That's fair; it was already off when he came. We didn't do it," Kol points out.

"I know you didn't, mate."

"I'm a hydraulic engineer with a private practice, and this was the result of a murderous attack after a meeting with a potential client yesterday afternoon! Why don't you bloody well jot that down if you want to be useful?"

There is a somewhat tense pause.

"You don't have to be rude," Kol says.

"Well, look, he's had a rough time of it. Let's have it, mate. How'd you lose the old boy?"

"I've been struggling for clientele, as is typical when you've only just opened your own practice, and so it was yesterday; I had given up and was only just leaving my office when the clerk came in to tell me a gentleman was waiting and wished to see me in regards to some business."

"And he had your thumb?"

"This was before the bloody thumb came off!" Victor Hatherley snaps.

"So did he cut your thumb off or not, darling? You've talked round and round this."

"Oh my God oh my _God_! Out the window! _Now_!" she orders Klaus, and opening it in order to more aggressively support the threat which she has been sure to insert into her voice between all Kol-directed ire, she throws him half out it, trusting in his brain to manage the complexities of setting down the tea, and not plunging to his demise.

"Sorry!" she calls out, bursting into the sitting room. "Caroline Forbes."

"Where have you been?" Enzo asks.

"I was having a nap."

"Masturbating," Kol says, and she takes him by the ear, and twists until she gets the distinct impression he's starting to enjoy it, and abruptly lets go.

* * *

 _November, sweet November, upon whose breast mortal summer dies, and deathless winter blooms. Bitter blow the fogs, and vile are Nature's intentions. Naked are we before it; neither youth, neither riches its stalwart knight, come to slay its eyeless dead. In November do we, still touched by autumn with all its sing-song leaves, dying, not hardly dead, feel it as the cold blast of corrupt loams from unfresh tombs fresh unsealed. Men repose, and do not get up again; it is the nature of the month. Have we any respite from it? No. Have we any recourse for it? No. Thus does progress halt at the threshold of November, and resume at the entry of March._

 _And in a cramped lodging room in Spitalfields, Miller's Court, it did not resume at all._

 _9 November is now infamous; but at the current point of our narrative, it had yet to sow its horrors. It was only any cruel November, gathering its hoards. There was, over the whole of Whitechapel, over the whole of London, the pall which the Ripper had left; for fear is certainly as opaque as any midnight pea-souper. But there was nothing particularly of note on this evening; perhaps there was yet a held breath, captive in the bosoms of every penniless whore. But there was none of them who ascertained it was to be a night any different from the other procession of nights during which they had gone out among faceless killers, and come back again. A sailor, having sailed any number of smooth seas, forgets, momentarily, the demands of his career; and that is why his bones have paid obeisance to immortal Neptune._

 _This room was only one such of its kind in a ground-floor flat, the rest of which had been closed off, and the back parlour of No. 26 rented out, for 4s. 6d. a week, to miss Mary Jane Kelly, late of Limerick. It looked out, through its sole two windows, onto the court; and the one of them peeked through two broken panes, which let into the room every nasty contrivance of winter. This is not an insignificant detail, and was a boon to the murderer, for having committed his final crime in a room which sufficiently confused the victim's time of death. The entrance to this room was in Miller's Court, with a designation of No. 13, and could be observed from the back of Mr. John McCarthy's shop, and from at least another three of the nearby tenements. They could watch the traffic which nightly went in and out of her room by the light of a gas lamp opposite her door. They did not watch it on the morning of the 9th._

 _Sensation has given Mary Kelly, instead of a face, its deformities; and instead of a soul, her profession, which naturally allows nothing of the sort. We have seen of her the ragged cheeks, and the pitiful underclothes, which the murderer in his frenzy cut almost entirely from her. She is no longer human but victim; and the two have nothing whatsoever to do with one another, for the latter, as soon as the deed is visited upon them, ceases to occupy their space among the race._

 _A few words, then, which you likely have not heard. The yellow lamp is flickering on, and the shadows beneath it many-faced; but let us pause, and see firstly for whom it is they have come._

 _Mary Jane Kelly was, not unlike the many other denizens of her profession, occasionally drunk, and prone to singing in the grip of it; it was during a drunken quarrel with her former lover and roommate Joe Barnett that she broke the window; and in addition to this she was fined 19 September 1888, 2s. 6d. for the crime of drunk and disorderly. She was married at sixteen, to a collier called Davis or Davies, and in the course of two years was widowed. In 1884, at the age of twenty-one, or thereabouts, she found her way to London, and there was engaged by a West End brothel, where she found some success as a courtesan, and owing to this had a brief trip to France, in the company of a client. From the sister of the landlady presiding over a house at which Mary lodged in earlier years, we have it that she was 'very quarrelsome and abusive when drunk but one of the most decent and nicest girls you could meet when sober'. It was with Joe Barnett she first rented 13 Miller's Court and lived, till the quarrel mentioned earlier separated them._

 _It is a poor summary; but not for whores the gilt biographers of kings._

 _To the morning of 9 November do we necessarily return, then._

 _You see the lamp before you, struggling into the gloom. Underneath it the same cobbles over which Mary Jane Kelly and her last client stumbled, perhaps laughing, perhaps solemn. At this hour is a silence which seems in the absence of teeming day a conspiracy of direst roots; and perhaps it is. For in what golden daylight are such acts committed?_

 _There is from the perspective of the gas lamp, for anyone standing at the back of John McCarthy's shop, the opportunity of looking through her window; but do not. Not yet. In the room there is a light; so does a single star on the black canvas of unrelenting night seem similarly benevolent. The light means all is well; and its absence, in the hindsight of morning, that all is lost. But the sun has yet to wake the frosts from sleeping dews; and to the eyes which from neighbouring windows occasionally seek it, the light is merely an indication of the lodger's present state of wake, and their sudden drop into hard slumber, when it goes out._

 _Now you come to the window. You have before you a void; the window sees into blackness; this unnavigable vastness, this great unknown- this be the corrupt loams into which the new dead are put to die again, the ignoble maturation of mortal bones. Here midnight has raised its howling ghosts, and put them, insomnolent, into your spine. So must her discoverers have felt, looking upon her soggy remains._

 _At this hour, the murderer remains; he is packing up a bag. He has put on his coat over the bloodstains. You see: there is a felt cap, of respectable appearance; and beneath it a dark fringe. His face I neglect to disclose, out of necessity; you will know it soon enough. This man is of average height and slender build; his clothes are of good make, though not sumptuous; he moves with no frenzied lust, and is only calmly packing up his tools. So are similar movements made by any tradesmen preparing for his day. The woman is no woman to him, but only a task, which he has completed. He has let out the blood, and now feels its relief. He does not look at the face; not out of guilt, no, but indifference; for having given him everything which it was in her power to give, she is now just the sack in which we are all conveyed, with varying degrees of success and attractiveness. There is nothing left to take out of her. In the act of piquerism has the necessary exchange between client and whore satisfied itself, and him. He is now no longer monster but man, and he walks, masked, once more into the masses, and never would you know him, but for one woman._

* * *

At precisely eleven in the morning when she is bent over her microscope, and Kol and Tim are napping on the couch, a sudden violent hammering almost takes the door off its hinges.

"Wake up, Tim," Kol mumbles, punching him. "I think we're going to be arrested."

"What did you do? And nobody gets arrested in my house, without my permission," she says firmly, and going to the door, opens it to find Klaus breathless on her doorstep.

"There's been another murder. In Miller's Court. The police are there already. It's a room this time, in a lodging house; no one's gone inside yet."

"Boys! Coats!" she yells, grabbing for her own. "You're going to break me and Kol into that room. I don't care how many policemen you have to bribe, or _gently_ physically _discourage_ , not kill. Do you understand that distinction?"

* * *

 _It was soon afterwards their lives and careers diverged once more. It was never to be sustained; He knew that. Of course He knew that. But there is, in all men, such a daft thing as hope, and He, faultless, had but this one deficiency._

 _We return, then, to the little room in Miller's Court, to the ignominious lumps of gleaming flesh which were once the woman Mary Jane Kelly. Naturally our protagonists have penetrated into the room which the law has not yet dared breach. Few are the corners into which He cannot delve. They entered single file, with Caroline at the head of them. There was a solemnity which is ordinarily the domain of the marital procession, or the funereal. They were utterly silent upon crossing the threshold. Kol, coming to the foot of the bed upon which was his specimen, looked first at the effect it had had upon Caroline, and then upon the corpse. He rolled up his sleeves. There was a professionalism in him directly correspondent to the paleness in Caroline. He did not break the silence until it was necessary for him to catalogue the evil done upon his fellow man._

 _London was then imposing itself through the broken window. It was working up an outrage; it was not yet ready. It needed to simmer. There was outside the window a police barricade, and the People behind it, not yet revolutionary; but certainly frothing. They had not cared about her in life; but death had put a crown on her head. Death often bears such an indiscriminatory sceptre._

 _What the newspapers have neglected to describe we will here put forth. The Illustrated Police News has shown you the face of Mary Jane Kelley; and we shall show you that it was the least which her attacker had done to her._

 _The following are the direct observations of Kol Mikaelson, current Philistine, former medical student:_

 _Body in the centre of the bed, nearly naked; the underclothes shredded completely by the attack. Shoulders flat, and the axis of the body to the left side of the bed. The head turned onto the left cheek, and the left arm close to the body, the forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across the abdomen. Right arm slightly abducted from the body and rested on the mattress. The elbow is bent, the forearm supine, the fingers clenched. Left thigh at right angles to the trunk and the right forming an obtuse angle with the pubes. The surface of the abdomen and thighs removed, the abdomen cavity emptied of its viscera. Breasts cut off, and the arms mutilated by several horrific wounds. The face is beyond recognition. Tissues of the neck severed to the bone. Uterus, kidneys, and one breast found under the head, the other breast by the right foot. Liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side, and the spleen by the left side of the body. Flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs on the bedside table. Bed clothing at the right corner saturated with blood; on the floor beneath a pool of blood about two feet. The wall by the right side of the bed and in a line with the neck marked by blood._

" _The mutilations are the same sort done to Nichols, Chapman, and Eddowes. It would have been a strong knife, very sharp, probably about an inch wide and at least six inches long. It was a straight knife for sure; possibly a clasp knife, a butcher's knife, or a surgeon's knife. I'm not entirely sure when she died, since the window's broken, and it would have let in the cold air, but I'd say most likely round one or two in the morning. There's a bit of her last meal in her stomach and throughout her intestines, so she had time to partially digest it, which means she was dead within a few hours of having eaten it."_

 _She listened, with her eyes shut, and the little fingers steepled beneath her nose. At this moment, He was taking a turn round the room, hands behind his back._

" _She's got wounds on her forearms and arms, plus the right thumb has a small cut about an inch long, so she fought him."_

 _There was another grief done to the corpse; the heart had been taken from it, and whether sacrificed to the fire which now lay cold in its grate, or whether taken with the murderer for his own personal means, is one mystery which I cannot unveil. It was never found._

 _Caroline lifted both hands gingerly, with great care, and checked under the nails. With the pen which Kol had packed into his medical bag she moved the chin to study the livid wound beneath it. She was speechless as she did this. There were a thousand things which were steadily contributing themselves to her thoughts, and at each moment turning the direction of them; she had looked at the remains as a woman; she looked at them now as a puzzle. She said, moving one of the fair curls from the left ear, "He attacked from the right side in the first five murders."_

" _But he wouldn't have had the room to do so here, with the bed and the wooden partition in the way," He replied, taking another turn, with his hands still behind his back._

" _So he would have had to come at her from the front, or the left. She has defensive wounds, which means he didn't kill her as quickly as the others."_

" _She would have lain down on the bed."_

" _And he pulled the sheet over her face." She tilted the head to the right, with the aid of the pen. They looked at one another; the look was of no significance to Kol, and can be of no significance to the reader, but it was explicitly understood in the language which they had fashioned for themselves, from a higher plane than it is for mere mortals to comprehend._

 _It was at this moment a face interjected itself at the window in order to announce: "The coppers are- Jesus, Mary and Joseph." This was the unnecessary bleating of the docker which Kol had taken to his bed, as a consequence of an absence in taste. He stood at the window without contributing anything further. He was a shade of pale which bears remarking, and nothing else which it would not be a waste of ink to document. He was joined in a moment by a second face, and this was the countenance of another character which it has been your misfortune to encounter in the multiple; that is to say, the ex-soldier Enzo, senior management of the Baker Street Irregulars. "The coppers are no longer indisposed, gorgeous. Everyone's in charge of handling their own individual fuck-offs before the bobbies descend, while I take our man Tim here for a walk. All right, mate, deep breaths." And so saying, he put his arm round the docker, and escorted him away._

 _I have said that in all the world, there are seven to whom the murderer is known; and two of them have not lived out this story. I cannot yet tip my hand. It is for a different denouement, to reveal their abbreviated fates. But this is a finale of its own._

 _If Fate pluck her victims from the assembled party, that is for a future pen; and from this one you shall have nothing but this: the murderer was behind the police barricade. He watched the two men walk away; in fact they nearly brushed him. He watched the medical bag swiftly packed, and the chin turned back to the position in which he had left it. He did not yet know, as you and I, that Mary Jane Kelly was to be his magnum opus, simply by virtue of the fact that she was his last._

 _There is one more thing which I must remark:_

 _You might say of him: you are stuck with your debt if Daddy can't budge it._

* * *

 **From the _Hull News_ , 10 November, 1888:**

LATEST NEWS. ANOTHER TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN WHITECHAPEL. A WOMAN BRUTALLY MURDERED. HEAD ALMOST SEVERED FROM THE BODY. FIENDISH MUTILATION. About half past ten o'clock yesterday morning a horrible discovery was made in Miller-court, Dorset-street, Spitalfields, in the immediate neighbourhood of Hanbury-street, a locality rendered notorious by the crimes of the past few months. The body of a woman shockingly mutilated, was found by a man named John Bowyer, in a room of a house at the end of the Court. Bowyer had been sent by Mr McCarthy, the landlord, to collect the rent of the room No. 13, which was occupied by the murdered woman Mary Jane Kelly who was in arrears. Upon knocking at the door Bowyer received no answer, and looking through a broken window he saw the woman lying on her back quite naked, while there were marks of blood about the place…

 **From the _Hull News_ , 12 November, 1888:**

THE BLOOD CURDLING CRIMES IN WHITECHAPEL. THE LATEST ATROCITY. AN IMPORTANT STATEMENT. DESCRIPTION OF THE SUPPOSED MURDERER. London, Saturday. A representative of the Press Association, who has since last night been investigating the circumstance of the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, in Dorset-street, Spitalfields, states that the excitement has in some degree subsided. Between one and four this morning numbers of unfortunate women frequented the thoroughfares in the neighbourhood with an unconcern which must be deemed remarkable. The strong detachment of additional detectives who have been requisitioned, as well as the volunteer watchers, performed their unenviable duties in the regular manner; but otherwise there was nothing in the aspect of affairs to excite the attention of a passer-by. Many persons state that the unfortunate woman never left the house, 26, Dorset-Street, after she entered it at midnight on Thursday. Others who were companions of the deceased, state that she came out of her house at eight o'clock on Friday morning for provisions, and that they were drinking with her in the Britannia Tavern at ten o'clock, an hour before her mutilated body was found. The hour at which the murder was committed is thus a matter of the first importance…

 **From the _Lincolnshire Times_ , 13 November, 1888:**

THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS. THE ASSASSIN SEEN IN LONDON. The Press Association says that fresh interest has been aroused in Whitechapel in reference to the recent murders by the statement of Matthew Packer, who keeps a fruit stall near the scene of the Berner-street murder, and from whom the murderer is believed to have bought some grapes for the unfortunate woman, Elizabeth Stride, shortly before the murder. He says that he saw the man last Saturday night standing near his fruit stall and looking at him in a menacing manner. Packer states that being alarmed, he asked a shoeblack standing near to watch the man, who, however, then ran off and jumped on a passing tramcar, and Packer could not leave his stall to follow him. There have been renewed complaints to the police recently from women who have been accosted by a man resembling the description of the assassin.

* * *

 **From the Inquest of Mary Jane Kelly (** _ **The Daily Telegraph**_ **, Tuesday, 13 November, 1888):**

 _ **Thomas Bowyer**_ **stated: I live at 37, Dorset-street, and am employed by Mr. McCarthy. I serve in his chandler's shop, 27, Dorset-street. At a quarter to eleven a.m., on Friday morning, I was ordered by McCarthy to go to Mary Jane's room, No. 13. I did not know the deceased by the name of Kelly. I went for rent, which was in arrears. Knocking at the door, I got no answer, and I knocked again and** **again. Receiving no reply, I passed round the corner by the gutter spout where there is a broken window - it is the smallest window.**

 _ **Charles Ledger**_ **, an inspector of police, G Division, produced a plan of the premises. Bowyer pointed out the window, which was the one nearest the entrance.**

 **He [Bowyer] continued: There was a curtain. I put my hand through the broken pane and lifted the curtain. I saw two pieces of flesh lying on the table.**

 **[** _ **Coroner**_ **] Where was this table ? - In front of the bed, close to it. The second time I looked I saw a body on this bed, and blood on the floor. I at once went very quietly to Mr. McCarthy. We then stood in the shop, and I told him what I had seen. We both went to the police-station, but first of all we went to the window, and McCarthy looked in to satisfy himself. We told the inspector at the police-station of what we had seen. Nobody else knew of the matter. The inspector returned with us.**

 **[** _ **Coroner**_ **] Did you see the deceased constantly ? - I have often seen her. I knew the last witness, Barnett. I have seen the deceased drunk once.**

 **By the Jury: When did you see her last alive ? - On Wednesday afternoon, in the court, when I spoke to her. McCarthy's shop is at the corner of Miller's-court.**

 _ **John McCarthy**_ **, grocer and lodging-house keeper, testified: I live at 27, Dorset- street. On Friday morning, about a quarter to eleven, I sent my man Bowyer to Room 13 to call for rent. He came back in five minutes, saying, "Guv'nor, I knocked at the door, and could not make any one answer; I looked through the window and saw a lot of blood." I accompanied him, and looked through the window myself, saw the blood and the woman. For a moment I could not say anything, and I then said: "You had better fetch the police." I knew the deceased as Mary Jane Kelly, and had no doubt at all about her identity. I followed Bowyer to Commercial-street Police-station, where I saw Inspector Beck. I inquired at first for Inspector Reid. Inspector Beck returned with me at once.**

 **[** _ **Coroner**_ **] How long had the deceased lived in the room ? - Ten months. She lived with Barnett. I did not know whether they were married or not; they lived comfortably together, but they had a row when the window was broken. The bedstead, bed-clothes, table, and every article of furniture belonged to me.**

 **[** _ **Coroner**_ **] What rent was paid for this room ? - It was supposed to be 4s 6d a week. Deceased was in arrears 29s. I was to be paid the rent weekly. Arrears are got as best you can. I frequently saw the deceased the worse for drink. When sober she was an exceptionally quiet woman, but when in drink she had more to say. She was able to walk about, and was not helpless.**

 _ **Elizabeth Prater**_ **, a married woman, said: My husband, William Prater, was a boot machinist, and he has deserted me. I live at 20 Room, in Miller's-court, above the shed. Deceased occupied a room below. I left the room on the Thursday at five p.m., and returned to it at about one a.m. on Friday morning. I stood at the corner until about twenty minutes past one. No one spoke to me. McCarthy's shop was open, and I called in, and then went to my room. I should have seen a glimmer of light in going up the stairs if there had been a light in deceased's room, but I noticed none. The partition was so thin I could have heard Kelly walk about in the room. I went to bed at half-past one and barricaded the door with two tables. I fell asleep directly and slept soundly. A kitten disturbed me about half-past three o'clock or a quarter to four. As I was turning round I heard a suppressed cry of "Oh - murder!" in a faint voice. It seemed to proceed from the court.**

 **[** _ **Coroner**_ **] Do you often hear cries of "Murder?" - It is nothing unusual in the street. I did not take particular notice.**

 **[** _ **Coroner**_ **] Did you hear it a second time? - No.**

 **[** _ **Coroner**_ **] Did you hear beds or tables being pulled about? - None whatever. I went asleep, and was awake again at five a.m. I passed down the stairs, and saw some men harnessing horses. At a quarter to six I was in the Ten Bells.**

 **[** _ **Coroner**_ **] Could the witness, Mary Ann Cox, have come down the entry between one and half-past one o'clock without your knowledge ? - Yes, she could have done so.**

 **[** _ **Coroner**_ **] Did you see any strangers at the Ten Bells ? - No. I went back to bed and slept until eleven.**

 **[** _ **Coroner**_ **] You heard no singing downstairs ? - None whatever. I should have heard the singing distinctly. It was quite quiet at half-past one o'clock.**

* * *

London is, at the hour of six o'clock, on the morning of 14 November, rather indisposed. It has emerged from the fogs of meteorological persuasion, having conceded to a watery sun; but hardly are its terrors so easily banished. The child wants only a bit of candle; and his full-size counterparts, who warred under Napoleon, who weathered Crimea, and now rest their frosting bones in the comfort of senility, that milk-eyed pacifier, demand a torch. Scotland Yard sends its constables by the dozens into Whitechapel, and the people their heftiest bruisers in corresponding numbers. No longer the sanctuary of morning contemplations, these alleyways, when the stroller in slow muse may think them in his leisure, where nature and populace dare not intrude.

But there still reside those pockets of respite, for the industrious explorer.

The fruit stall of one Matthew Packer, for instance.

Here, there is little but the echo of his own footsteps, which he measures out precisely, in order that their reverberations with orchestral finesse betray his coming.

Matthew Packer is of unremarkable physical appearance, slightly stooped, haggard; London has beaten him into something which now retains only the faint phantasm of youthful beauty, and set him out in the rain in order to while away at even this.

"Hello, mate," he says softly, and the head comes up slowly from the usual ministrations of a shopkeeper about his daily business.

"Can I help you?"

"I require your stall."

"Excuse me?"

"Your stand here. I'll be borrowing it. You'll be well-compensated, of course. With your life." Here apply the dimples, that for a moment they must question if he has really said what he has said, in tones of such menacing confidence.

"I'm sorry," a voice says behind him, and the scruff of his neck is snatched up roughly in a smooth hand. "What he meant was we need your stand for official police business. All profits in the course of business will be handed over to you, naturally, and you'll be compensated monetarily for your troubles. I'm Inspector Jones, and this is Constable Clark. He's new. That's why he comes across like a jerk."

The voice he does not know; the touch upon his nape and the slow hissing of it down his spine he would recognise anywhere.

Caroline is standing behind him in the guise of a fresh-faced young lad, whiskerless, in mended boots, clean trousers, and a froth of red curls which she has tamped down underneath a worn bowler. The voice she has pitched to meet the requirements of a youth, albeit one of a choir boy's sopranic capabilities.

"Inspector, eh? You look a bit young."

"I'm very good at my job. Promoted quickly."

He stands placidly enough under the demanding hand, still bunched in the skin of his neck, whilst Packer debates this turn of events.

"What are you doing here?" he asks when Packer duly departs with the pound notes which Caroline has pressed into his hand.

"The same thing you are, except more politely."

"You realise, love, that he hasn't seen any murderer? His testimony is absolute rubbish; it's changed too many times to be of any real concern."

"Do not patronise me," she snaps, still holding him by the nape, "I'm well aware he's full of so much self-aggrandizing crap that probably your real intention here is to kill him, because you're worried about him hogging all your hot air. But he's been in the papers twice now claiming to have seen the murderer. And I think whoever the murderer is carefully follows every little tidbit the media puts out on him, and that our friend Mr. Packer here might be of some interest to him. Where's the safest place from which to watch all of the chaos he's orchestrated?"

"From the fruit stall of a man who has been utterly dismissed by the police as having anything of value to contribute to the investigation."

"Exactly. Put this on." She releases his neck, and into his arms shoves a bundle of clothing. "And don't even think about mentioning the disguise you brought with you; I _know_ you made like one half-hearted at altering your face because you are that freaking vain."

"Why tamper with perfection, love?"

"Ok, well, if perfection stands in the way of my investigation, then it can lower itself to paste on a 56 ½ year old grocer over its faultless divinity, etc., or it can get the hell out. _Go_."

* * *

At various intervals, first Enzo, then Tim, then Kol arrive to take up their observational posts under the costume of vendors: Tim with an assortment of penny pies, Enzo ham sandwiches, and Kol with his cart of fried eels, billowing its hot steams and sharp vinegar.

* * *

London lightens, lengthens, begins to withdraw into itself, and the boys trade out their wares for others, peel off or tack on facial hair, adopt one accent, put on another.

And he doesn't come.

She watches as customer, as seller, as pedestrian.

She paces the street, or skirts it entirely; she buys one of Enzo's sandwiches, sells one of Tim's pies; she does not look at Klaus, 100% the worst purveyor of fine fruits she has ever seen.

The sun, embattled, holds in weary vigil its waning strength.

"Stop staring at me," she says to Klaus on one pass of his stall, and to Kol, "Stop flirting with Tim."

She has this feeling. In some dark depth, unstirred, she senses- something. Unnamable, unknowable. She knows only: listen.

And into the surrounding alleys she plunges, lifting her skirts over horse manure, tipping her hat at ladies.

* * *

"Jesus I'm after dying. I've never had a shift on the dock so grueling."

"It's the unrelenting terror of failure that does it," he says, ladling a bit of eel and broth into a cup. "Vinegar?"

"No," Tim replies, and takes it from him. "Is she watching?"

"She's scolding Nik."

"Sure that doesn't mean she isn't watching meself at the same time." Tim picks at his bit of eel, looking round with that shiftiness of the newly prison-sprung. He pulls up his collar. "I'll cop to the murders meself, if it means we can all go home for a bit of tea. I could be a mutilator."

"Of course you could, darling." He pinches the flushed cheek. "She's turning round, by the way."

"Jesus fuck me," Tim blurts, under-handing the cup to him. "Back to me station. If you tell her I was here, I'll murder you in your sleep, me hand to God."

"Nice visiting with you, Tim!" he calls out loudly, whilst Caroline, alerted to a potential escape from her chain gang, whirls upon them both with mad shushing gestures. "What part of 'undercover' did you misunderstand?" she hisses.

Tim, suffering an unfortunate and acute failure of hearing, takes off at what might reliably be described as a sprint, if he didn't, as you may have observed, have the dignity of all involved in mind upon fashioning his observations. He would therefore like to call it a brisk manly man stride, of no relation whatsoever to Caroline and what proximity she can gain in that rage-fueled leap she does very nicely. There was once a murderer in Leeds who could attest to the surprising (un)limits of its trajectory, but he's quite dead now.

* * *

The watch she wears around her neck reads nearly five when she is by necessity forced to march up to Klaus' stall, where Enzo is leaning back on his elbows, eating his third ham sandwich.

"Call off your sniper."

The immense ability of his bitch face to penetrate the layers of her own hand-crafted design is very nearly impressive. "No."

" _Klaus_."

" _Caroline_."

Enzo takes another bite of his sandwich.

"Call. Off. Your. _Sniper_. If you shoot Enzo, you know exactly what will happen."

"An immense satisfaction, the likes of which I have never felt before."

"Klaus." She has this Look she uses on misbehaving members of the junior Baker Street Division, dogs, and Tim; she employs it now, but in an implicit sexual kind of way which he should interpret as the yawning absence of the following: anything to do with his penis.

He works his jaw around.

"Klaus."

And finishing his sandwich Enzo wipes his fingers on the lapel of Klaus' coat, ensuring a five minute strangling match, to the victor go the empurpled spoils.

But the sniper is called off.

* * *

Tim, in direct confrontation with his cowardice, circles back round to the cart some minutes later, in order to watch Enzo and Nik handily beat the piss out of one another. He is currently in possession of a moustache, and looks an absolute tit.

"This is the first time I'd rip off something other than your trousers first."

"You wouldn't even bother with me shirt first? You've got no romance in you. A man does like to be coddled a bit, you know."

"Are you flirting with me?"

"Em, I don't rightly know so. I've never been very good at it. I believe that was the intention, though, yeah. If you're tingling anywhere, yes. If not, I was only making polite conversation, you absolute degenerate. Our man's getting the best of it I think."

"A pound on Nik."

"I can't afford to lose a pound. Enzo's a good man and a real scrapper, but your brother's not the full shilling."

"He's not even half the shilling. A sexual act on Nik," he offers instead.

Tim and moustache turn to contemplate him, redly. "Right. I'll lay me own on Enzo."

"Winner's choice."

"Winner's choice," Tim agrees, and they shake on it.

* * *

The rain has come on again, rather restlessly. It is the hour in which it knows itself to be least welcome, when men and horse alike must put up their collars, and trudge out their final hours. The lamplighters have gone with phantom competence about their business, and sent the jets flaming into the world. And now do all the prickly bits of the world, displeased with their lot, begin to impose their tenderless horde. The rain has got at him under the collar, and the wind sent to mar his hair (no less striking for it). Better men, with saner roommates, have already settled into their slippers, and set themselves upon their suppers.

The old hanging signs have not sounded their cries in over a century, but London is no less haunted for it, and conjures from its settling depths all the din of an old house and its various spirits. When the fog rises, it is hardly of note, but only a thing that must come out of the night, in a street such as this, surrounded by the usual cast of characters. Nik, naturally, has brought down the entire mood, so that he can name, with no bias whatsoever, Commercial Road as the most unpleasant and direst of the whole peevish lot.

Enzo and Tim have joined him beneath the umbrella of his stand, and with undivided attention are watching Nik and Caroline argue over whether one Richard Earl, convicted of larceny committed on the 8th of April, 1845, had for an identifying mark a scar on the left thumb, or one on the right. It is every bit as fascinating as you may imagine, and both have devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the resolution of it. If Nik had refrained from conducting himself like a sodden tit in 80% of his humanly interactions, he might be persuaded to disclose to him that no argument, since the invention of Caroline, has ever been won by anyone else; but, alas, it's only fair he learn the hard way, with slapping.

Enzo, having armed himself with his third cup of eel, and ladling into it far more vinegar than can be recommended by either good sense, or anyone within mouth proximity, says, through a horrifying mouthful: "If he doesn't concede in the next five minutes, he'll die."

"He might die anyway." Tim sounds vaguely hopeful.

"Did you ever hear the Cornwall story, mate?"

"I never did. What's the Cornwall story?" Tim asks.

Enzo pokes at his eel, roiling it about, and now with the vinegar at full olfactory tilt, tips it back into his mouth.

"Someone died," he interjects before Enzo can eject a fatal breath on the subject.

"Someone always dies in your stories. What's significant about someone dying in Cornwall?"

"It was a dark and stormy night. I was handsome. Caroline was sitting by the fire-"

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you awful little cunt, would you only tell me what happened?" Tim says in a passion, but as he has yet to divest himself of The Moustache, he has forfeited any valid opinion.

"That's what I'm doing. Anyway, where was I? Right, I was handsome. Very handsome, actually, and my penis was in excellent order-"

"This isn't the Cornwall story," Enzo interrupts, without sacrificing the quality of either his eating or his surveillance of the Richard Earl argument, which in its progression has come now, if not to blows, certainly to latent sexual tension, and upset his supper, where it lies uneasy in his belly, quivering before such occultist horrors.

"How would you know? Every story starts with me being handsome."

"Because we were in Cornwall on the recommendation of a doctor Caroline made you see on account of the Cough," Enzo replies with full capital gravitas. "You weren't handsome; you looked like something that had been regurgitated. We thought he was about to cock up his toes, so off we went to Cornwall for a holiday and some fresh air. Caroline fed him broth and tea by hand for the first week."

"I tried to hide."

"She always finds you, mate; remember that."

"So after the hiding failed there was a dashing escape attempt-"

"Also failed; turns out there's no getting anything past Caroline, especially when the thing you're trying to get past her is that you've stripped all the sheets from her bed to make a rope, not a 'special fashion scarf, darling, you wouldn't understand; it's all the rage in Paris at the moment.'"

"I've never been more afraid in my life than when she started trying to pull the rope back up."

"Well, you could have jumped, mate; we were only on the second storey, and you were halfway down the rope already."

"I was feverish. I thought the ground was snakes."

Whilst they have been carrying on, the darkness has been compounding itself; and out of the ancient bits of the world which have not lost the old magics, and sometimes must raise a howl, there comes, out of the long, shivering night, on delicate silk, with her skirts at full rustle, the dread Beast: for hell is empty, and all the devils are Bekah.

"Lovely to see you, darling," he says, proffering a cup. "Would you like some eel?"

"I don't eat street food," Bekah sniffs.

"Just street walker."

"She isn't a prostitute, she _runs_ the brothel."

"Naturally I'm sure she never came by the knowledge of prostitution and its financial soundness by unsavoury means."

Bekah gets the business of their inferiority underway by looking round the street with an unnaturally elevated nose; as Tim has never been forgiven the grave sin of preventing his brutal stabbing, she is particularly sour-faced upon deigning to acknowledge his existence, which he must understand, by means of her expression, is no more significant than the bit of horse manure she has to step round to reach the stand; and in fact is significantly less significant, in the way that the Irish often are, unless they are Peers, and not overly raucous about hailing from the incorrect part of the Empire.

"Elijah sent me to collect Nik for supper. He's invited you as well."

"I'm sorry, darling; I'd rather die. Under an ugly man."

"Fine," she snaps.

"If there's supper, I'm available," Enzo puts in, helping himself to his next cup of eel.

"Aren't you the _help_?" Bekah demands.

"And a charming conversationalist." He leans over the counter, into her hallowed space. "Lorenzo St. John, bachelor, boxer, and purveyor of fine murder, if the crime or the threat to Caroline calls for it."

Bekah is unmoved; but then Satan has always been a tough crowd. "What's wrong with Nik's face, and why is he giggling?"

"What's wrong with his face is that he's masquerading as the man who normally runs that fruit stall, and not everyone can be so genetically blessed as us. He's giggling because he's moved on to a far superior oppressive blonde bitch."

"Oi!" Tim and Enzo exclaim at the same time.

"You know I mean 'bitch' as the highest of compliments when speaking of Caroline. I don't mean it in that sense when talking to you," he points out to Bekah, who seems now to be in the process of measuring up his jugular, and whether or not she can reach it before Tim intercedes. As Tim has a rather lengthy reach, and the advantage of at least two pistols, Bekah, like any predator, sees in her victim more fight than murderous triumph, and as getting herself ruffled in the process has never been much to her taste, she stalks off to ruin Nik's day.

She has not yet interrupted Nik and Caroline when he sees, to the left of the square where they have set up their wares, an old and unloved face. Stefan Salvatore is standing well within shooting range, his hand on the elbow of a man who has turned away. There is what looks to be a rather frothy conversation, and then the man, dark-haired, a little slighter and a little taller than Stefan himself, wrenches his arm away and vanishes into the streets.

"Do you remember when Tim and I were in a spot of trouble the other day with Caroline?"

"You'll have to be more specific than that, mate. Are you talking about the stolen police chaise, the other stolen police chaise, the kidnapping, the first time you were caught trying to deflower our man here on Caroline's analysis table, or the second time?"

"No, no, this was on Wednesday, not Tuesday. And we were only snogging."

"Ah. The arrest."

"No; and we were only arrested a little. It doesn't count when you escape police custody before you even reach the prison. No, remember our little tiff over Stefan Salvatore? She went on for some length with some nonsense about not following him round?"

"Right."

"Can I direct your attention away from my sister's heaving bosoms to the right side of the street?"

Enzo looks. "Do we need to kill him?"

"Out of necessity? No. But there's always sheer pleasure as a motive."

Caroline, springing in her usual manner from out of nowhere, and startling Tim, says, "We're not killing him, leave him alone. He is the only contact I have at Scotland Yard that's actually willing to cooperate with me. And I invited him here. Everyone behave." And so saying she goes away to speak with Stefan whilst the three of them look on with either open or poorly-concealed disdain.

"What's he doing here?" Bekah asks shrilly in his ear, as if he won't in future require the use of it.

"What do you mean? I just asked you the other day if you knew Stefan, and you told me you didn't."

"I didn't know his name. Do you think I associate with the police?"

"Only when you're fake crying over the expiration of another husband."

She rolls her eyes. "Anyway, I've seen him a few times at Katherine's. He was there the other day; some drama with one of the clients. They get a bit out of hand occasionally."

"And I thought you lot were such a classy bunch. What sort of a spat was it?"

"What do you mean 'you lot'?" Bekah snaps, and Tim with a sigh positions himself within knifing distance. "And how would I know? I told you I don't associate with the police."

"I mean you're fucking a prostitute, darling, and anyone who has to pay for it is already angry with the world, and prone to quarreling with it."

"I do _not_ pay for it."

"Right. I'm sure you don't. After all, you've only murdered four husbands, I'm sure the populace is eager to give themselves over into your talons."

" _Nik_ murdered-"

"Two of them at most, darling."

Enzo, perking up, sidles a little closer to Bekah.

"I don't have to stand here and listen to this."

"I really wish you wouldn't."

" _Fine_!" Bekah hisses, and trying to storm back over to Nik, is arrested by his hand on her elbow.

"Don't walk round Katherine's place at night; take the carriage or don't go. Don't start doing it just because I said not to. You'll be murdered, and then I'll have to avenge you. And you know how I hate avenging you; it's a bad look. People will think we're in love."

"I'll do what I like, thank you. If I'm murdered, you don't need to bother about me," she snaps, and doing so, yanks her arm out of his hand, and flees in the direction of Nik.

There is a silence, awkward on Tim's part, preparatory on Enzo's.

"Right, gentlemen; well, I'm off to secure myself a dinner invitation, and a position as husband number five. I can be a lord, or whatever you people are, and watch what I eat."

"You've never watched what you've eaten in your entire life, darling."

"True. But at least I'll die doing what I love," Enzo says with immense cheer, and straightening up his collar, he reaches over to rip the Moustache from Tim's face.

"Thank you; I've never wanted to have sex with him less."

"Cheers," Enzo replies, and saluting with the bit of false hair flapping in his hand, goes off whistling to meet his doom.

* * *

There's nothing.

Sometimes she stands, in the early mornings, when London is still moored under its fogs, listening into the long alleyways. And she hears...this vast deafness.

She hears the frost popping in its hollows and the horses sighing into their burdens and into the harbors the softly shushing ships- and _none of this helps her_ , she can't see him, she can't _fathom_ him-

She meets Klaus at various coffeehouses with all the newest editions under her arm.

She goes about all her usual daily business of living: the usual cases, the usual quarrels, the usual needlework and readings and boxing with Enzo.

On rare occasions, when they are both home, and there is only the two of them, she barges into Kol's room with some dramatic exclamation: woe is her, etc. etc., and she flops onto the bed, and wants to know, is she a failure. _Why_ is she a failure. Sometimes on these nights she remembers everything about her that was unloved, that was unlovable. And he puts an arm around her and his chin on her head and they have this moment: they don't talk. They read whatever book he currently has open on his lap, and then they both go gently into sleep.

December goes on in this way. The rains, torrential, snuff the final gasps of autumn; and London, mired, melancholic, hunkers down to wait, resigned, for the Ripper to come on again with the same senseless injustice.

She is not overly proud of this (she is not any measurable quantity of proud of this), but, once, she storms into Klaus' office while he is meeting with a client, and saying to the man, "Get out; whatever poor person is about to get horrifically murdered can wait," she locks the door behind him.

For a moment the two of them stare at one another over Klaus' desk. He has his hands folded on it. She feels his eyes touch, hot, on everything.

There's always this tangible something in the air. He can't just look at her; he has to impose himself on her, all the whole immense weight of him and everything he's done: she can feel that. He is not a normal man, with normal socially polite desires, she tells herself, and straddles him in his chair, grabbing his face one-handed, and wrenching his head back.

He always waits. He wants her to come to him, when she can't bear it anymore.

She doesn't kiss him. She holds his face like that, immobile, and unbuttons his pants, roughly; she undoes her own. She watches him as she re-positions herself once she finishes pulling down her pants with her free hand, not sliding down onto him, hardly touching him, just the warm tip of him against her clit, slickly. His lips twitch; his eyes do not.

She undoes his cravat, messily, as she does finally sit back, one shuddering inch at a time, and ties his hands together behind his head.

And then bracing her feet on the floor she exorcises every ounce of frustration she has felt over this entire case, his freaking stupid _face_ , rubbing herself against him, plunging back down onto him while he sits there, rigid, with his head tipped back, breathing brokenly, the chair squeaking wildly, the hissing of his pants between her own naked thighs, the buttons of the fly she has just barely peeled out of the way in cold contrast to him inside her, inside her hand.

He arches up, once, with a creaking of his spine, when she bites his ear, and then she unbuttons his shirt, and gives his nipple one languid lick, to counteract her frantic hips.

When she comes, she screams, "Oh my God, oh _God_ ," and the servants politely decide tea will be needed elsewhere, and turn aside from the study.

Klaus rips the cravat off his wrists, and taking her by the hips, lifts her, still shuddering, off him, and pushes her down against the desk, smushing her cheek into a letter he was in the act of composing.

He gives one rough thrust into her; she comes half-off the desk. She feels one of the big nimble hands slide over her thigh, and between her legs, onto her sensitive clit, and pictures how he must look, head thrown back, mouth open, his thighs, his ass, all of him clenching with each hot thrust, slippery with her, and she doesn't know why, she's right on the edge, she can feel the next wave, crushing, but she gets her hands on the desk, she pushes back, she gasps: "Come on me."

And he pulls out of her with a ragged breath, and flipping her around, so that she is half-lying across the desk, disturbing all his papers, upsetting the inkwell, he starts to stroke himself in quick jerks, leaning one hand down on the desk next to her, winded, his sides heaving, his hand working, working.

She slides her fingers into herself.

He makes another sound in the back of his throat.

She finds every sensitive spot inside of herself, noisily lets them know this, bites his shoulder, his arm, his neck, and he rears up, his shoulders pulling taut, and she feels the warm surging of him over her breasts, and comes again.

They both have to sit down in his chair for a while.

"Is that Thomas Gainsborough's portrait of Georgiana Cavendish?" she asks breathlessly, looking at the painting over his head. "Adam Worth stole that in 1876."

"And some of us stole it better, love," he says, stroking one hand over her hair, and smiling down at her in a way that makes her throat knot up.

* * *

He imposes himself in his usual way on all her endeavours, and invites himself along on several of her cases, some of which he has orchestrated.

When Lestrade reluctantly contacts her over a vanished cargo ship, he leans in close to her ear, and whispers, "Do you want to know how I did it, love?" and she says, "Don't patronise me; I already know", and clapping her hands, calls Lestrade's men to attention.

On one bitter evening, with the fire at full roar, he has a bomb delivered to the Baker Street flat.

She disarms it in 22.2 seconds (Enzo times her on Tim's pocket watch). Upon dismantling it, she discovers a dinner invitation inside the device.

"What if I hadn't disarmed it?" she demands when she storms into his well-appointed dining room, and sitting back in his chair, he smiles like a big charmed freak.

"Then you'd be dead, and I'd know I misplaced my affections."

"Your brother was in the apartment at the time."

Klaus shrugs. "Then he'd know he'd misplaced his affections as well. Wine?"

* * *

On December 14th, when the boys have already cleared out for the evening, there is a knock at her door. She pulls it open to find him standing there, hands behind his back, smile on his face. He is engaged for some time in this, just staring at her.

"There's a gang," he says eventually, with all the gravity of someone bestowing a knighthood, or a death sentence, "that's not under my control, and is beginning to assert itself rather annoyingly. I thought you might like to help me take care of it, before I address it in the usual manner."

"The Green Gate gang?" she guesses immediately.

"The very one."

"I'll get my coat," she says, snatching up the cane leaning beside the door.

* * *

There's a party on the evening of 14 December, which he, Tim and Enzo have departed for in high spirits, with their arms linked, and a good bellyful of whiskey in each of them. It is a nice enough night to be classified as 'clearish'; the mists have foamed up a bit and then withdrawn into themselves, with some regret, and leaving behind a few patches here and there to suffer indignantly at hock-level, depart for the harbours. The moon is in similar difficulties about how far she ought to cover the street, and how far she ought to leave it submerged; and coming for some time out of the clouds, flees once more behind them, leaving the alleys to the domain of the gas lamps, which light with fickle competence the sweating cobblestones. A good bit of the fog which has not made for better pastures, with more picturesque sheep, has got down his collar; and he tightens it up accordingly, and does up his muffler round his mouth.

At the building for which they are bound, men can be seen arriving in cabs and on foot, many of them with portmanteaus or tin boxes in their hands. These are done up as men, in dinner jackets and proper good moustaches; but the ones which have got nothing in hand and come already attired for the evening can be seen in various states of femininity, most of it low-cut, and with improperly modest ankles. There is a rustling of taffeta and silks all round them, as of the sea coming softly to shore, and there settling to be sodomised. Anyway, metaphors are Nik's strong suit, not his. And you might well as be prepared for all the sodomy, as the orgiastic flavours of this sort of party run rather to the far side of Bacchalian, where the wine might well run dry, but never the cock.

They mount the steps to the building into which the procession is streaming with their portmanteaus and powdered faces. The windows are covered in calico, and here and there only seep a shuttered yellow strip which cannot be contained. At the door they give the password and are admitted; Enzo is almost immediately absorbed into the crowd as if it's been standing mournfully all the while on its widow's walk, waiting for the sea to return him, and having given up hope, now runs with great passion into his arms. There is a slender, grey-eyed man with well-ordered curls who breaks out of the main crush beaming all over his face, and reaching his hands round Enzo's neck, pulls him into a thorough kiss.

"Uh," Tim says beside him, articulately. "I thought Enzo wasn't…"

"He isn't. But I've brought him round to several of these; he's very popular. He had sex with that man at one of them, just to try it. He said he had a 'smashing good time', but it was women for him. They still have a good snog occasionally, however, for old time's sake."

The dancing is already well underway, and surges all round them, giddily, in the vulgar way of music halls, where nothing is restrained, and spills out everywhere, absorbing the entirety of the building into it. There's a fiddle player with more enthusiasm than talent, but as he can stay on count, and has for an audience a lot of drunk sodomites in bright tulle, he is elevated to masterly status, and long may his name be heard (in knowing whispers).

Tim is trotted off by a bloke in a blonde wig and yellow satin, with too much rouge on his cheeks, but a nice fluttery bit of lashes, and green eyes of beautiful clarity, without a bit of brown to muddy them. He keeps an eye on them whilst collecting champagne, in case it should be necessary to break the blonde's hands. Enzo, dancing with the grey-eyed man in a manner which can be called by turns tawdry, unrefined, and even outright gross, waves as Tim is spun past, shouting something to him that gets itself muddled in the general clamour.

On the benches lining the hall various couples and quartets are engaged in a hearty disdain for England's anti-sodomy laws. The more retiring ones depart in twos and threes for the receiving room attached to the main hall, and return deliriously disheveled.

Out of the fray Tim is somehow flung toward him, and catching him by the hands, he spins him, laughing, through enough turns to put him unsteady on his feet, and then flings him once more into the mess.

As the dancing consists of only a lot of jumping round and an amount of rubbing directly proportionate to the attractiveness of one's partner, everyone not engaged in flouting those Biblical commandments which have concerned themselves with what a man does on his own time, in his own bed, if he is comely, and so expanded his repertoire, has thrust themselves with great enthusiasm into the whole writhing mass of it. He gets his ass touched a number of times, and his cock once, briefly, and thereafter not again, as Tim applies a look unique to someone currently in possession of three firearms to the man who ventured it.

Enzo with the nonchalance of a man utterly secure in his sexual inclinations is in the process of a thorough petting by two men.

Tim has taken off his jacket, and rolled up his shirt sleeves, leaving his forearms in good state, and ruffling up his hair under the hat, smiles at him in a rather besotted way, so that it's necessary to grab him in the middle of the dance floor, and kiss him into incoherence.

* * *

There is, of course, no need to fumble round after the Green Gate gang. He is well-acquainted with their various lairs, and stepping round to a tavern at which its leader can often be found over a tankard, they enter its clamour with all the usual nonchalance of regular patrons. Caroline, in trousers, with her hair pinned up, and the cane tapping before her, draws several stares; but among this company, one's business is used to being tidily minded, lest it be handled by someone else. They look away, hastily.

"Mr Shepard?" he says with unerring politeness to a broad-shouldered man currently in conversation with the bartender.

"Who are you?" the man demands with less than unerring politeness, which naturally he is prepared to overlook, should a civil reminder of how one ought to address their betters smooth this rather coarse beginning.

He licks his lips. Stepping up beside him, Caroline latches onto his arm, deploying her nails. "Do not immediately kill him," she whispers into his ear, sending a shudder through him. "Unless either one of us is in immediate danger of death, mutilation, or some combination of the two, you leave him alive, ok? I am delivering these people to the police. Not cold-bloodedly murdering them. Do you understand?"

"Vaguely," he replies, whilst Mr Shepard looks on with a distinct lack of proper veneration.

"Mr Shepard," he begins again, with Caroline's nails still in his arm. "You and I have something in common."

"What's that?"

"This territory. Unfortunately, your reign has come to a sad and ignominious end, mate. I suggest you surrender it easily, and then we can all part without any unpleasantness."

"What?" the man says, with his uncomprehending little eyes, and then there is a parting in them, as of a veil lifted, and a brief flash of cerebral workings. "You're from those Dove Row cocks, aren't you?" And in order to cement his ill manners, he reaches into his jacket for the pistol which can be seen there glinting in the uneven interference of the lamps between the folds of his jacket.

Caroline brings the cane down on his hand, and from there into his face.

Mr Shepard flips backward off his stool, and in the ensuing racket drawing three of his minions, which have been drinking in the corner.

Caroline ducks beneath the chair of the first, which he swings with murderous intent at her head, coming up underneath him, inside his guard, and with an elbow smashing in his nose, and with the cane smashing in a far more integral piece of the male anatomy.

The second draws a knife, and as he seems in some eagerness to use it on her, he finds it necessary, in spite of her edict, to redirect the weapon into the man's own stomach, and heaving him into the bar, brings his head down on the edge of it till there is nothing much left by which his own mother could identify him.

She has already kicked the third into a table, overturning it and the drinks of its gaping inhabitants. "What did I say?"

"He did try to stab you."

She contemplates him for a moment. "All right. I'll allow it."

* * *

Naturally, they adjourn to the receiving room.

Tim rips off his jacket.

He rips open Tim's shirt.

There is an uncoordinated flurry of limbs going this way and that, and clothing in sad disarray, attempting to make itself scarce, and only getting muddled in the process, so that when they blunder into a sofa, and fall over on it, everything is only half undressed, and all the good bits are still modest. He tries to fix that while Tim tongues him in a distractingly filthy way. If you are curious who it is makes the best kissers, it's Catholics; there is no more despicable bedfellow than repression, who wants it all, in a manner unbefitting of reasonable humans.

A couple in the corner, who are only casually twined round one another, and have not yet begun to get at the degrading stuff, watch in an invested way. He makes eye contact with the man on the left, who in response pulls up his skirt to his waist, in order to get hold of himself. Then Tim, having worked down to one of his nipples, kisses back up his throat, and round to his mouth; and then he's busy holding Tim's arse in his hands, and rubbing in messy uncoordination against him, and what the man does with it is his own lurid business.

There is some difficulty in getting open either of their trousers, whilst they are both trying with a mad sort of half-sanity to come in this unsatisfying state, with layers of clothing still in the way; but he does manage it, and pulling out both their cocks, wrenches down Tim's trousers far enough that he can get a handful of his bare ass, which is springy, if you were wondering. And then Tim in his ecstasy lets out a breathy string of curses in his ear, and as that makes him rather hot everywhere, into his toes, he bites Tim's neck, which is similarly well-received.

Anyway, he's afraid neither of them last very long, which should not be understood as a lack of virility on either part, but a natural consequence of some furious wanking beforehand on the dance floor.

When he can sit up at last, he sees the couple in the corner enjoying themselves in the full penetrative sense of the word.

* * *

When Klaus drops her off on the stoop of the Baker Street flat, he stands for a moment, looking down into her eyes, and she feels...that. Not the cold and slinking imposition of the night, trying to get at all the raw parts of her, but him, and the stare, and the proximity of him. And it's hard, when he isn't smug, when he isn't posturing, when he is only staring at her like this, in an insulating way, with the world just an outside thing happening independent of them, to remember what he is, who he's hurt.

She clears her throat.

"So. Thank you for demonstrating...a little restraint."

The dimples deepen. "You know, love, I think we're rather good at this. Perhaps we should consider...a merging?"

"Really? And how do you propose to do that? I fight crime, you commit it."

He steps in closer to her, his hands still behind his back. "We fight inferior crime, and commit superior. There's always compromise in any business endeavour."

She steps back a little, onto the stoop, feeling over the ice which has begun to form on it, and toward the door. "Good night, Klaus," she says by way of answer, and the smile never loses its luminosity, he says through it, softly, "Good night, Caroline," and she stops with her hand on the door, looking down at him through the bits of mist which are amassing in the air between them with the delicacy of a hesitant snow.

She steps back down, and takes his collar in her hands.

She doesn't know why. But she takes the collar in her hands, and she pulls him down into her, and kisses him with something like- something not like any frenzied rendezvous where she is just trying to sate something. He leans his forehead on hers, and they just sort of go into one another, softly, breathing against the other.

He is shaking, or she is.

When she pulls away, she sweeps one hand back through the curls on his forehead, lightly, and this too he leans into, shutting his eyes.

She leaves him there on the stoop, and goes into the warm hall and the safety of it, the sturdy immutability of the same wallpaper Mrs. Hudson has never changed, and the ceaselessly burning lamps, as they always were.

* * *

They leave Enzo with the grey-eyed man in his lap, mounting what looks to be a rather decent argument against the limitations of restricting one's appetite to a single gender, and walk home holding hands in the darker alleyways, where neither gas light nor pedestrian dares.

At the stoop, they hunch into one another in order to share a cigarette, whilst the fog builds up from its polite origins, and begins to summon its armies.

* * *

She leaves the cane beside the door, and goes around turning up the lamps in the sitting room. In the street below there is the singular quiet of winter, when all the world has gone into itself, and can't bring itself to come out again.

There was nothing out of place with the entryway: she knows that. And in blue shadows her analysis table lays untouched, waiting.

But her bedroom.

The door is closed; it was closed when she left. No stray fingerprint marks the gleaming knob. There is in no corner of the flat, innocuous with the lights from the lamps, any single inch out of place.

But she feels a cold knowing in her.

And as she turns back in the direction of the cane, the bedroom door flies open, clipping her, spinning her, and down on top of her comes a man, his hand on her throat.

* * *

"Caroline's in," he remarks, seeing the lamps bloom one after another in the window above them. He has got up to beat the frost out of him, clapping his hands and pulling up the muffler round his lips. "Fancy another round before we go upstairs and she starts to impose her usual insane restrictions on us?"

Tim laughs through the cloud of his cigarette. "On the stoop? I'm not taking out me prick here, even for you. You can have a kiss and be satisfied with it," Tim says, and pulling him down by the muffler, kisses him in a lingering, bastardly sort of way, with enough tongue for it to be cruel, if he hasn't any plans to follow up.

* * *

Breathe breathe breathe breathebreathebreathe _breathe_ , she thinks, and then: no. Focus. The man is kneeling on either of her arms. He is gloved, masked, and hatted. Slender but not effeminate build; no presence of calluses beneath the thin kidskin of the gloves. No creaking of the knees, but only a smooth folding onto them, therefore young, possibly late twenties, early thirties: of some athletic ability.

When he turns his head, she sees his ear poking out from behind the mask, under a tuft of dark hair, and she thinks: no. _No_.

She doesn't have to be right, not always. But she cannot bear to be this wrong.

* * *

"You coming in?" he asks after another draw on the cigarette, and snatching Tim's hat from him, places it on his own head.

"No, I'm after having another fag. Go on. I'll be up in a moment."

"The flat's warmer. I'll let you smoke in my room; Caroline never has to know."

"Caroline always knows, _darling_ ," Tim tells him in a passable attempt at his usual smouldering insouciance toward something so insignificant as death. "Love it if you didn't get me murdered, lad."

* * *

Right right right right. So. An upended worldview is no reason to die. Then: he has a knee on either arm, at the level of the bicep. Her torso is bracketed between his thighs. In full working order: both her hands and legs, because she is only, after all, some teensy woman who will bow as a woman always does.

She jabs one hand hard into the side which he seemed to be slightly favoring when he knelt down; she cannot get the range for a punch, but stiffens the fingers, so that they angle up beneath his rib cage, and into what she can feel is a new scar, still pink with its freshness. He cries out, and loosens his fingers instinctively; she takes one long breath, and hooking her ankle over one of his own, thrusts up with her hips, throwing him to the side, into the analysis table, which shudders, and throws down a few helpful beakers onto his head.

She tries to bounce his head off the edge of the table, and he seizes her by the hair, and using all his weight, bears down on her once more, pressing her into the carpet, putting his knee now into the back of her neck, his hands once more around her throat, and she breathes, once, a guttural thing, and flails, and quiets: there is no value in panic. No; you have to shut down all the primal instincts of the animal brain, and only _think_ : there is in every living creature something vulnerable, and a way in which to exploit it.

There's also a piece of glass in her hand, from one of the beakers.

She jabs her hand back to stab him in the thigh, but the weight suddenly lifts, inexplicably; and she turns over on her back to find a white-faced Kol kneeling beside her, and the edge of the man's coat disappearing through the door.

"Go-" she rasps. " _Kol_ \- _after_ ," and jabbing her hand in the general direction of the door, which is trying to swim out either to meet the stairs, or to flee them, she can't be certain, tries to convey how monumentally unimportant she is in this particular moment.

He touches her tender throat, just for a moment, and then sprinting toward the door, screams, "Tim! _Tim_!" down the stairs, and now she hears him take them three at a time, and the rasping of the gun hissing free of an interior coat pocket.

She tries to sit, steadies herself on the leg of the table, watches the floor in reddening wisps float shivering up to touch the ceiling.

She does make it down the stairs, in a cumbersome half-sliding movement, her legs in watery disapproval giving out, and when she tries to force them into some semblance of order, giving out once more; Tim, coming into the foyer, blurts out, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph" and catches her halfway into her next crumbling.

She has only just been assisted into sitting on the last step when Kol steps back inside, looking completely thunderous.

"Did you…?" she asks, and can't get on any farther.

"No. He got away. What are you doing down here? Get back upstairs, are you bloody insane, Caroline? Give me a look at your neck."

"I'm fine." She brushes him away. "He-"

"Got _away_ , Caroline. We'll fix him later. If you make a try for him right now, I'm telling Enzo." And then pressing one hand into the bridge of his nose, where she sees it shaking subtly before he steadies it, he storms back up toward the flat as Mrs. Hudson is coming out of her own apartment in her dressing gown, demanding to know what's happened, at this hour of the night.

"It's only he's terrified," Tim tells her, gently. "Will you come upstairs, please? Just to calm him a bit? Let him have a look at you. We're all right, Mrs. Hudson," he says when Mrs. Hudson's demands turn now into something frightened as she stands looking down at her in the hall, pulling the dressing gown about her. "She's had a fall; there's nothing to worry about, she'll only be a bit mottled in the morning." And then, "Shh, shh, there you are" when Mrs. Hudson, sensing something of far more menacing weight, suddenly bursts into tears, and kneeling beside Tim, takes her into the old spindly arms.

"Oh, it's those clients always round to see Mr. Forbes! Murderers, the lot of them! Are you very hurt, my dear?"

"I'm fine, Mrs. Hudson," she replies, taking a long unhurried breath for the sake of Tim, who can contend with one crying woman, but probably not two. He is already rubbing Mrs. Hudson's back, with clumsy well-meaning, and making little motherly shushing sounds.

"I'm ok," she says again, so that she can believe it herself.

* * *

Enzo, of course, is told.

Next morning Tim is sent round to fetch him whilst he sits on the edge of Caroline's bed and maintains a heated argument with her over whether or not she is to be let out of the flat. They are neither of them overly pleased with the other when Tim and Enzo arrive, but as she hasn't the strength to mount her usual militaristic control over the situation, she is made to lay about the bed, whingeing, and with a mug of tea in her hands that is not hardly finished before it is replaced.

"At least bring me the paper," she says.

"No. You're to lie here, admire my face, and think about nothing."

"Kol! I didn't even pass out!"

"It doesn't matter, darling. The flow of oxygen to your brain has been shut off, even if momentarily, and the consequences can be lingering, and possibly fatal. I've seen someone die days after a choking."

"I'm not going to die; I have a party to plan on Friday."

"Do you have a headache?"

"No."

"Any nausea?"

"No."

"Are you lying to me?"

No!"

"Did you see anything? Do you know who might have done it?" Enzo intervenes, coming into the room well-disheveled, and with someone's rouge on his cheek. He is hardly put together, his jacket on inside-out, and there is about him the breathless quality of a man who, forgoing the cabs, has let his fear carry him on foot through all the winding labyrinth of the December streets.

"No," she says, taking a sip from her mug.

He lets Enzo get in his clucking, and a detailed adjustment of the covers round her waist before he herds everyone sans Caroline out the door and into the stairwell.

"Where are you going?" she demands.

"To gossip about you, darling. Downstairs," he says to Tim and Enzo. "She has the ears of a bloodhound."

When they are safely out in the morning, with the wind chastising them for the enormous oversight of having brought no coats, and Tim mounted as sentry facing the windows of the flat, to ensure she hasn't cracked one in order to listen in, he says, "She's lying. She knows who's done it."

"What are we going to do about it?" Enzo asks.

"If she isn't telling us, it's because she's determined to confront them herself. Which means she'll outsmart all of us, escape the flat, and with her usual flair, and her cane, try to bring them to justice. So we have to get in a bit of cleverness before she does."

"Well, she has just had the oxygen cut off to her brain. We probably have something of a chance now," Enzo agrees.

"We follow her. But we can't all leave the flat; she'd be suspicious. She'll expect us to leave a guard, while the rest of us follow up on the cases she can't pursue from her bed. Whoever stays behind will be drugged. Don't ask me how she'll manage it from the bed, whilst under watch, but I know her, and I know her vast supply of chemical concoctions. Tim, you have the more naive face; it ought to be you. If I take something to drink from her without any suspicion, she'll know I'm plotting something."

Tim sighs.

"Enzo and I will wait at the cab stand round the corner. She's also lied about the headache, so she ought to be a bit fuzzier than usual. If we haven't seen her walk past us within the hour, I'll come back round."

"She's at the window," Tim warns.

"Right. Scatter, gentlemen."

* * *

When Enzo and Kol leave for the evening, and Tim remains placidly by her bedside with a book in his hands, she turns to him with a smile, and says, "Tea?", sweetly. And like the good gentle man he is, he takes it without a thought, and she does feel just an infinitesimal amount of bad about that.

* * *

Well-muffled, in two of Kol's coats, and a scarf Enzo draped gently round her before departing for the evening, she is shown into the receiving room of Katerina Petrovna's brothel.

"Tell me about Damon Salvatore," she says, unwinding the scarf, and forgoing Katherine's offer of refreshments.

* * *

In Scotland Yard there is only the soft ticking of a clock, distantly. She feels her heart in her throat. She feels her footsteps, echoing, and all around her breathless winter bearing down. There is a stray constable here and there, who asks her can they help. And she says no, she says, thank you, she says: she knows for what she has come.

She thinks, maybe, he has an inkling. When he looks up from his desk and he blinks and there crosses his face this flickering uncertainty, some troubled heaving of his conscience, she thinks: yes. Look up at her like maybe she's your ruin, come inevitably.

But he doesn't; his face clears; he sits back in his chair. He says with pleasant smile, "Caroline! It's a bit late; I didn't expect to see you. Is everything all right?"

She doesn't sit. She doesn't unwind the scarf, or take off any of the coats. She stands with her hands linked behind her back in this unconscious imitation of Klaus she can dissect later, in front of her hearth, in front of her tea, with the wind in howling disapproval trying for her windows, and the cracks beneath the doors.

She says, "Did you know, Stefan, that the ears of family members are remarkably alike, and someone can be identified just on the similarities between them?"

He blinks. There is a pen in his hands, which he twirls nervously. She hears the tapping of it against his flesh, against the desk, and far away the clock, metronomic. "I...wasn't aware. That's interesting. Is that what you came to tell me?"

"It is interesting. It's interesting that last night I was attacked in my apartment by a masked man who had ears almost exactly like your own, but not quite. Definitely not you; but a very near relation."

The pen stops. There is only the clock now, aloofly.

"So then I remembered: once you briefly mentioned a brother who was often overseas. And I checked some shipping manifestos from around the time of the Annie Chapman murder, and it turns out that in the time between the Chapman and Stride/Eddowes murders, your brother Damon took a trip to Baden Baden. Now, this is significant, because in a flat which was obviously the former lair of the Whitechapel Murderer, I found the remains of Annie Chapman, and a bit of mud from the precise region of Baden Baden. Don't interrupt me," she says when he opens his mouth. "You say nothing. Not now. There was also, in the pocket of a jacket left behind, a pair of women's undergarments. These undergarments belonged to Rebekah Mikaelson. That's where I got lost; I thought the murderer had something to do with her. But Rebekah Mikaelson is having an affair with a brothel owner called Katerina Petrovna. I assumed it was a former lover of hers who was jealous, and in an obsessive rage was killing off prostitutes as a substitution for Katherine, who could only be killed once, which is far less satisfying for a raging lunatic. The victims _were_ substitutions for Katherine- because he was obsessed with her, not Rebekah. Rebekah's clothing was taken by accident, because she was keeping it in Katherine's wardrobe, and he assumed it belonged to Katherine."

"Caroline," Stefan tries to interject, absolutely white-faced.

"I said don't talk. Rebekah was attacked while walking to Katherine's, and stabbed her attacker before he ran away. Damon had an injury in his side that he was still favoring when he attacked me last night, approximately where he might have been struck by someone swinging with their back to him as he grabbed them from behind. I've already talked to Katherine, who confessed she was having an affair with Damon, unbeknownst to Rebekah. Which is probably fortunate for both of them, knowing that family. Katherine said he scared her sometimes; but she thought he was only a little intense maybe, a bit over-dramatic. Not obsessive. But then, I've said from the beginning this is a man with the ability to walk among us like he's just one more person. I've also said from the beginning that he was close to the police; likely not an officer himself, but with access to one. So you see how everything sort of pulls together. At Matthew Packer's fruit stand, you were speaking with a man briefly before I came over to you. His back was to me, but I can tell you he had the same coloring, the same stance, the same build as the man who attacked me. That was Damon, who came to watch the owner of the fruit stall who claimed to have seen him twice during the murders, just as I thought he would." And here she pauses, taking one step toward the desk. "I didn't see him, because I trusted you. And you helped him hide. You helped him cover this up. You warned him about me, about what I could do. And you blocked me from the investigation. The 'police conspiracy' you warned me about was your conspiracy. You isolated me from the rest of the department so we couldn't trade information, so we couldn't put all our little separate pieces together. So your brother could continue murdering and mutilating your own people, the ones you're supposed to be protecting. And what's more," she says softly, with a hint of Klaus in her tone, "you were afraid I was going to catch him anyway. Kol, Tim and Enzo attended a party last night for men of a certain inclination. The party was known to police. There was in fact a raid scheduled to take place. But it didn't. It didn't take place because you called it off, to keep them out of the apartment. It wasn't enough to have them arrested; they've escaped police custody before. You knew there was a chance that if the party was interrupted early they'd slip away and return to the flat earlier than you anticipated. So you let it go on. So I'd be alone, and vulnerable. Coincidentally not at all, your brother's exact type." She does not unlink her hands. She stares down at him, unblinking. "You can talk now."

He folds his hands on his desk, unlaces them, puts them together once more, sits back, forward, perfectly upright in his chair. "Caroline. I didn't- Damon's troubled. I wanted- I was trying to stop him. I tried to talk him around. I tried to-"

"You tried nothing, other than to protect a man who was hurting women."

"I'm going to have him committed, I swear."

"So he can never face a trial? So the public never knows if the murderer is still out there or not? So that _you're_ never tainted by him?"

"Yes," he says, clenching his jaw. "I will have him committed, Caroline. I swear to you. But no one's going to know what he did. There's no evidence here. I made sure we managed to lose it in our archives. You have some babbling about ears and some soil you illegally collected from a crime scene. You have nothing."

The clock ticks ticks.

And then: the decisive bong, full-voiced, through all the echoing halls.

"He won't be committed," she says, unmoving, while the clock cries on. "He'll be dead."

She has one thing.

* * *

At the hour of one, Caroline enters the study in which he receives his clientele, frosted by the light snow which these early hours have decided to visit upon them.

He sets down his pen, in order to be more fully absorbed in her.

"I want to hire you."

He sits back in his chair, steepling his fingers. "I presume you've come about the Whitechapel Murderer?"

"Then I presume that means you know who I'm talking about. Did you know before-"

"No, love. About the same time, I should say."

"So you followed me."

"I have my means, sweetheart, which must remain my means alone. We are, after all, as you have so eloquently stated time and again, on opposite sides of the law."

She has a wonderful air about her; he's seen it in many an indifferent criminal who in a blase humour consults his bloodied hands as if they were only a bit of unruly dinner, migrated from his plate.

"Then you know what to do." She looks steadily on at him, without any twitch in her face, to foretell a quailing conscience. "You don't have to make it quick."

"No," he says. "I'm not particularly disposed to that," and leaning forward he touches the marks on her neck with more tenderness than it is often supposed there ever was in him.

* * *

 _There is a headline from 18 December which may be of some interest to the reader in the closing of this account. From the_ London Daily Post _:_

 _ **Barely a month removed from the latest Ripper atrocity, tragedy has come most brutally once more to London, this time claiming two brothers. The body of Chief Inspector Stefan Salvatore of Scotland Yard was last night discovered by two men strolling in Hyde park, in a most frightful condition. He had been beaten about the face by a blunt object, and suffered a variety of broken bones, including both his knees, which were smashed so violently as to cripple him, had he survived the attack. There were three men seen in the vicinity, one of whom was carrying an object which may have been a cricket bat, according to witnesses. The public is entreated to offer up any information which it may have on these three men.**_

 _ **This was however the least of the attacks. It was within hours of this a strange sight was observed in the vicinity of Miller-court, very near where Mary Jane Kelly met her end. In the early hours of the morning the statue of a brass bull was found facing 26 Dorset-street, that flat which the unfortunate woman occupied. It was vaguely smouldering, and concerns of an explosive were conveyed to the constable on duty nearby. When the statue was at last opened, there was found inside the body of a man identified as Damon Salvatore, in a badly burned state, with his tongue cut out, in the manner of the Greeks. It is naturally impossible to avoid speculation on a possible connection to the horrific Whitechapel murders, considering its vicinity to the last crime, and the history of this particular bull, which in ancient times was known as the brazen or Sicilian bull, and used as a means to punish criminals…'**_

 _There is little left to tidy up. It was soon after this denouement Caroline departed for the city of St. Petersburg with Lorenzo St. John in tow, and it is there she still resides. As for the rest of the dramatis personae, Kol Mikaelson has gone with his tart docker to seek the lost city El Dorado; an infrequent series of telegrams indicate he is still alive, and not in possession of any great riches aside from his considerable family estate. Rebekah Mikaelson is stormily married to her fifth husband._

 _Naturally, He has London well in hand, having no longer an opponent of equal merit, and only the fumbling attempts of Scotland Yard to foil him. It is equivalent to a chess match against a blind man, who has had both his arms off, and requires the use of his feet in order to manipulate his pieces. London is pale indeed without her._

 _But there is always the possibility of enticement, for who can resist either Him, or the challenge he presents to one with the capacity necessary to meet it?_

 _At the time of my writing this, he has in hand the entirety of the royal family, which honesty compels me to add have come to perceive him not as a subject, but rather a son._

 _It is the lot of all royalty to concern themselves over a receding_ heir _line...and what may be discovered waiting in the stead of that natural progression._

 _So let us close for now this one lengthy chapter, and see if the book, though certainly a masterpiece, is perhaps but an incomplete one._


End file.
